


Kairi and Axel (Lea) Go to Pizza Planet

by pageofpages



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Crack, Drugs, Gen, Kinda, Musical Number, No Plot/Plotless, OOC everyone, Some light angst, but only kinda sorta, mentions of ptsd maybe, stoner comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:55:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28039530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pageofpages/pseuds/pageofpages
Summary: “You weren’t kidding about this being your first time, were you, princess?” Axel says, from far off but somehow right in her ear.“What do you mean?”“I’ve been asking if you want to go get something to eat for the past,” he pauses to check his wrist. “Five minutes.”“You aren’t wearing a watch.”“And yet I still know half past skin means five minutes.”Kairi feels her stomach. The fairies had made a giant plate of pancakes for breakfast which she had only barely finished, but that was hours ago at a quarter past skin. And since keyblade training was pretty much high-intensity strength training and cardio—“I could eat,” Kairi says.After smoking a bowl with Axel—er Lea—Kairi agrees to go get pizza from this one place Axel swears is the best in the universe. A road trip ensues.
Relationships: Kairi & Lea (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	Kairi and Axel (Lea) Go to Pizza Planet

**Author's Note:**

> takes place ambiguously after dream drop distance and the middle of kh3, but otherwise time is an illusion.
> 
> originally, this was supposed to be a short little crack fic--no more than 2000 words. oh, well.

It doesn't take Kairi very long to lose herself in the rhythm of puff, puff, pass. Smoking weed is a surprisingly tactile activity—or at least the process of passing the bowl back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and. Wait. She realizes that Axel—Lea—is holding out the bong to her again. She takes it back and lets him light the bowl again with a finger. That’s a pretty useful power.

“Thanks, it’s my one party trick,” he says

“Wait, did I say that out loud?”

“Did you say what out loud?”

“Uh...”

Something shiny catches Kairi’s eye. It’s her keyblade—Destiny’s Embrace—resting against a tree, the setting sun reflecting off the blade and making the rays dance and play and other cliched images of what light is supposed to do across the grass.

“You weren’t kidding about this being your first time, were you, princess?” Axel says, from far off but somehow right in her ear.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been asking if you want to go get something to eat for the past,” he pauses to check his wrist. “Five minutes.”

“You aren’t wearing a watch.”

“And yet I still know half past skin means five minutes.”

Kairi feels her stomach. The fairies had made a giant plate of pancakes for breakfast which she had only barely finished, but that was hours ago at a quarter past skin. And since keyblade training was pretty much high-intensity strength training and cardio—

“I could eat,” Kairi says.

A grin spreads on Axel's face. He helps Kairi to her feet and takes the bong back for himself. She reaches out to take it back because it’s still her turn, but then pulls back to stare at her hands. In all the movies where people smoke weed there’s always that one sequence where the characters find their hands—or fingers—to be the most fascinating things in the universe. As a person who has traveled the universe and experienced some truly psychedelic shit while stone cold sober—albeit unwittingly on occasion—Kairi wants to know what the fuss is all about. 

Her hands are just hands.

Axel starts fiddling with his Gummiphone—probably scrolling through Seamfull or CredibleEdibles or some other food delivery app with a suspiciously off-brand sounding name—and sighs. 

“Mmmkay, so, bad news: nowhere delivers here,” he says.

Kairi blinks, confused. Why on earth (lol, Earth) would anyone deliver to an alternate dimension with just a Wizard’s tower on it? From what Kairi understood from Yen Sid’s magic lessons thanks to the world order thingy, no delivery service even knew about other worlds and probably couldn’t even make a Gummi ship. 

“I mean, we can just raid the fridge?” Kairi says.

“No, no, no. This is your first munchies meal, we gotta do it right...” he pauses. Snaps his fingers and gently taps his forehead, “Duh, we can go get pizza.”

“Pizza would be nice...”

“Pizza would be fuckin’ ace,” Axel corrects. “Besides, there’s this great place I used to take—” Axel pauses again, but this time like he’s struggling to remember something. “I used to take an old friend there. It’s, like, _the best pizza in the universe_.”

Considering that he’s traveled all over the universe, that's probably not an exaggeration,

He leads Kairi over to the Gummi garage. She catches sight of herself in the reflected chrome of some unused Gummi block. Her eyes are bloodshot red—like she’s been crying or something. But definitely the “or something” being “smoked a bowl with this guy that kidnapped me one time.” Yikes. 

It doesn’t seem like Chip and Dale are in the garage, so Axel makes to call for them, but Kairi covers his mouth. She holds a finger to her own lips and then executes a complicated series of gestures that includes pointing at the Gummi ship, making a a butterfly with her hands, and then thumb wrestling him. Kairi assumes Axel understands she means that she wants to sneak on the Gummi ship when he just shrugs and follows her lead skulking around and behind things. 

“You know we could've just asked, right?” Axel asks once they get into the cockpit.

“Do you see how red our eyes are? Nobody can know I'm stoned, Axel”

“Lea”

“Nobody can know I'm stoned, Lea. _Nobody._ ”

“Why not?” Axel asks.

“Did you know I’m a princess?”

He shrugs, “I mean, yeah. One of the princesses of heart or whatever.”

Kari claps her hands to Axel’s cheeks and pulls his face dangerously close to her own. She stares deep into his eyes which are this really striking shade of blue. No green. No blue. Green. Blue green. What’s the word for that color again? Cyan? Teal? Or maybe turquoise? Turquoise is a pretty nice name for a color. 

“Uh... Kairi?”

“Oh!” Kairi collects herself and stares at the point between Axel’s eyebrows this time so she doesn’t get distracted. “Smoking weed is _illegal,_ and I have to be a role model and stuff.”

Axel mulls this over for a second—or twelve—after Kairi lets him go, “You do know that you aren’t actual royalty, right?”

“... I’m not?”

“Princess of heart is just a title and probably refers back to the cultural fascination with young women and purity which is why it is inexorably tied to simultaneously maidenhood and royalty to imply that one is the best-of-the-best or whatever and at the height of their pure maiden whatever qualities,” Axel says in a single breath. 

What Kairi actually hears is, “Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess Princess inexorably Princess Princess Princess”

“Cool,” she replies. “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

* * *

Once Axel gets them in the air, Kairi takes back the bong and takes her turn at last. She figures that if she shouldn’t feel guilty about smoking in Sora’s Gummi ship. Besides, do laws even really exist in the vast reaches of Gummispace?

“I mean, if they do, I never followed any of them,” Axel says.

“Did I say that out loud?”

“You’re kinda-sorta a chatty Kathy, Kairi.”

“Who’s Kathy?”

“That,” Axel says, dramatically. “Is a mystery for the ages.”

He holds out his hand for the bong and Kairi graciously passes it back. She covers her mouth so she can think about the legal system without saying any of her varied thoughts aloud like if laws did exist in Gummispace, who would even enforce them since the various worlds were supposed to be separate? Keyblade masters probably, but the idea of someone like Sora or Riku issuing traffic citations or whatever was laughable. So, of course, Kairi starts laughing.

“Care to share with the class?” Axel asks.

“So where exactly are we going?” Kairi says instead.

Axel winces, “Okay, so, don’t make fun of me, but I can’t remember its name—”

“Oh, so you didn’t have it _memorized_?”

He lightly shoves her, “Let’s just say I probably forgot about it because of the Castle Oblivion nonsense.”

All Kairi knows about Castle Oblivion is that it was where Organization XIII was keeping Naminé and that climbing the floors made people forget things. Though it wasn't exactly clear from Riku’s retelling of events how much of this was because of Naminé’s magic and how much was because the castle just had freaky memory powers. 

“Weren’t you guys immune to that though?” she asks.

“I thought so,” Axel sighs, exhaling a big cloud of smoke into the air. “But there’s a bunch of holes in my memory from my Organization days, and I worked at a memory-stealing castle for a while so two plus two must equal fish.”

“Four.”

“Huh?”

“Two plus two equals four, Axel.”

“Lea.”

“Oh, my bad,” Kairi says. “Two and two make four.”

“Didn’t I say that?” he asks. As Kairi shakes her head no he giggles, “Anyway, what I _do_ remember is where the pizza place is.”

He points off in the distance and gives her a knowing look. Just beyond a asteroid belt Kairi sees a clocktower. She doesn’t have the heart to tell Axel that, unlike everyone else, she never really traveled the worlds in any traditional manner beyond going to Yen Sid’s tower, and thus has no real ability to recognize the worlds on sight from Gummi ship POV. 

They land the ship in a little forest outside a bustling city by the sea. Kairi hopes no one noticed their giant, brightly colored spaceship which doesn’t even camouflage well against the treeline. Considering how none of Sora’s stories featured the Gummi ship getting stolen or people even realizing that he was (technically) an alien, Kairi thinks the Gummi ship has to generate a SEP field of some kind. And then she takes the last hit from the bong.

“Dang,” Axel says. “I guess I’ll have to stock back up after all this.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s no big, just spot me 50 munny for it later.”

Kairi reaches for her wallet, “Wait, does this world even take our money?”

“Why wouldn’t it take our munny?”

“No! Not munny, money”

“Saying same word back-to-back doesn’t make your meaning any clearer, princess.”

Kairi takes a breath and tries again to ask if the local currency is the same as what they have in their wallets currently since it would be pretty weird if an alternate dimension used the exact same currency despite how apparently the worlds were supposed to stay separate in all aspects. To which Axel simply says:

“Everywhere uses munny, Kairi, stop thinking so hard about it.” 

He leads them into a city square in the sweet spot between bustling and abandoned. There are just enough people around that Kairi finds herself anxious again about getting caught stoned (what if someone tells on her?), but few enough that she’s certain no one is close enough to smell the lingering smoke on their clothes. 

Besides, most of the people they pass only seem to notice Axel. It makes sense. He’s a giant man with even bigger bright red hair spiked in every direction in a black robe leading a small girl around. If Kairi didn’t know him, she’d be pretty suspicious too.

“Have you ever considered changing your cloak?” she asks.

Axel tugs at the front of his robe and examines the front zipper, “If you’re trying to get me naked, Kairi, I’m snitching to your favorite keyblade master.”

She shoves him, “You know what I mean. Don’t you have any _people_ clothes?”

“I’m a person and these are my clothes.”

Kairi is about to tell him that the cloak (and the whole of his general appearance) makes him look like either a gangster, cult member, necromancer, or all the above simultaneously when she feels someone sling her over their shoulders and take off running. Instead of screaming or fighting back, Kairi starts laughing. 

Of course, _yet again_ , she ends up kidnapped. _Of course,_ the narrative of her life has devolved so far into self-parody that she can’t go anywhere without getting kidnapped. It as if the higher power that serves as the author for her story is determined to demote her to a damsel in distress despite all she’s been through. 

If she had the wherewithal, Kairi would look into the camera like Jim from The Office.

Unwilling to end up a bargaining chip again for weirdos trying to open Kingdom Hearts, Kairi calls her keyblade and stabs it into the ground. Her kidnapper falls backwards thanks to the sudden opposite force and Kairi uses the momentum to flip over to safety. However, because she’s stoned, Kari doesn’t land gracefully on her feet and instead lands on her kidnapper’s stomach. She readies a punch, but realizes the kidnapper is a familiar face.

“Wait, _Pence_? Is that you?” she asks.

“Hey, Kairi,” he coughs. 

“I don’t think we can call this a rescue mission with you flat on your ass, Pence,” another voice says. 

Kairi turns and Hayner is leaning against a nearby stairwell with Olette by his side. She helps Pence back to his feet and sends her keyblade away. It is at this moment that Axel somersaults in only marginally more graceful than Kairi’s flip. He holds up his hands which are clasped together like a pistol.

“Drop the ingenue, PaRappa,” he shouts, a tiny fireball shooting from his fingertips and landing pathetically at his own feet.

Hayner points a big blue baseball bat thingy at Axel, “You’d like that wouldn’t you?”

“Who’re you calling PaRappa, red Sonic?” Pence demands. Pauses. Realizes. “Knuckles!”

“Look,” Olette says, drawing a slingshot. “You’re outnumbered. So… we’re just gonna take Kairi and go.”

Fifteen seconds late with starbucks, Kairi’s brain catches up.

“A rescue mission?” Kairi says. Remembers the last time she saw these people. Then, “Oh geez, wait. This is all a big misunderstanding.”

From there Kairi decides to explain everything that happened to her since last she saw them. Ending up in jail in city that wasn't supposed to exist, fighting Heartless, fighting Nobodies, learning magic, befriending Axel—Lea—smoking weed—

“Wait, are you still stoned?” Hayner asks.

“Uh...”

“You are! You totally are!” he cackles.

They’re in The Usual Place—the trio’s hideout—so Kairi has no reason to feel embarrassed and yet she still is. While she explained everything and assured the others that Axel was definitely a good guy, Olette held him back at slingshot-point. With the story finished for the most part, Olette lowers her weapon but gives Axel a quick “try me and you’ll regret it” look.

“So, what brings you back to Twilight Town, Kairi?” Pence asks. 

“We came for pizza,” Axel says. “At that one place in Tram Common. I figured it’d be a good munchies meal.”

“Do you mean...” Hayner snaps his fingers in the air a couple of times. “Olette, what’s the name of that place?”

She taps her forehead, “It’s on the tip of my tongue...”

“I mean, you can just take us there as an apology,” Axel says.

Pence shakes his head, “We’d love to, but I’m pretty sure that place closed down a while ago. Like maybe a a week or two before we first met you, Kairi.”

With that the group begins to brainstorm suitable alternatives for a munchies meal. Or at least the group minus Kairi. She checks out after the third time Pence suggests something called “tex-mex.” Her mind wanders from thinking about what tex-mex could possibly be to bees buzzing to the sound of game show buzzers which leads her to thinking about wrong answers which leads her back to—

“Sure is weird that none of you can think of that pizza place’s name,” she murmurs.

Hayner waves her off, “Not really. Whenever we have weird holes in our memory, we usually assume it’s a Sora thing.”

“Why would Sora be connected to a pizza place?” Kairi asks.

“We could always check it out,” Pence suggests. “It could be the ninth wonder of Twilight Town!”

“Wonders?” Kairi and Axel say.

Hayner, Pence, and Olette grin at each other. Pence grabs a coffee can from under a hidden compartment in a drawer and reveals a ridiculously large bag of weed. Or at least Kairi assumes that it’s ridiculously large on account of being a gallon sized Ziplock as opposed to the itty-bitty dime bag thingy Axel had produced his weed from.

“The wonders are best experienced after one has par _toke_ n,” Hayner says.

Kairi doesn’t have the heart to tell him that isn’t a word[2] and finds herself in a circle doing the puff puff pass with the group. Olette explains it’s a strain called Green Requiem which earns a giggle snort from her and Axel. 

“Who even names these things?” she whispers to Axel.

“I think technically we did,” he snickers. “Or at least the OG organization members.”

They finish the bowl pretty quickly between the five of them and Pence says something which leaves everyone giggling as they pour out of the Usual Place towards the various wonders. First they head over to a set of stairs that changes number when you go up and down (though Kairi is pretty sure that they can’t get their counts right because they’re all stoned). Then they look at some balls next to a wall and listen to some moans coming from the underground tunnels. After that, the wonders start to blur together. Kairi vaguely remembers staring at her reflection in a waterfall, chasing a floating bag, and shaking some trees. The final wonder they go see—they skip number six because the Ghost Train apparently only comes at certain times of the day—is at a mansion at the edge of the woods.

“Ughh, not this place,” Axel says.

“You’ve been here?” Hayner sputters.

“I mean, kinda?” Axel continues. “My best friend got stuck in here and I broke in a couple of times.”

Olette and Axel start talking about different methods of breaking and entering, but Kairi stops paying attention once something from the mansion catches her eye. A curtain in the top floor window flutters as if someone had just pulled it back. That had to be the wonder; a rustling curtain that someone could mistake for a ghost. Kairi is pretty sure smoking weed before coming by to see it doesn’t help, but then she sees something else. The curtain rustles again, but this time a hand reaches out of the darkness and pulls it back. A familiar, but wrong face peers out.

“Sora?” she gasps.

Sora—no, it isn’t Sora, there’s something off about his face, she doesn’t feel the tug of his heart calling to hers—sneers at her and points at something behind her. But she doesn’t care about whatever it is, she wants to know why this not-Sora is in Twilight Town when he’s supposed to be taking his mastery exam. Kairi starts climbing the fence. He holds up his hand, gesturing for her to stop. Mouths something.

“Turn around?” Kairi echoes.

“Kairi, the gate isn’t locked,” Pence calls. “You don’t have to clim—”

He’s interrupted by a sudden roar from the woods. This time Kairi does look. A group of Soldier Heartless led by a Powered Armor leap from the tree line. Axel springs into battle first, batting a volley of fireballs he conjured from nothing with his keyblade at the Soldiers. Kairi leaps from the gate, expecting to do a somersault through the air and stab her keyblade into the Powered Armor’s face, but she only drops a couple of inches to the ground because she hadn’t actually climbed that high up the gate. 

“Well, that’s embarrassing,” she murmurs, summoning her keyblade and throwing it like a javelin at the Powered Armor. 

It pierces the emblem in its chest instead of the head—which is a bummer since she really wanted that headshot. She casts Gravira and slams it into the ground on top of the Soldiers trying to avoid Axel’s fireballs. They all explode in a bright light and the spectral image of several hearts rose into the air and vanished.

“What. The fuck. Was that?” Hayner squeaks once the dust clears.

“That,” Pence says, pointing at Kairi. “Was a bad bitch. We have to stan.”

“I thought you said you’d fought with Sora once,” Axel snickers.

“Wait, Sora!” Kairi says. She whirls back around to the mansion and the not-Sora isn’t in the window anymore. Instead, there’s a Heartless emblem drawn on the windowpane in some kind of pink ink.

“He’s _fine_ ,” Axel says. “Remember, he’s still doing his mastery stuff.”

“But I just saw—” Kairi points to the window where there is no longer a not-Sora watching them or a Heartless emblem on the windowpane.

* * *

The group decides to make their way back to Tram Common. For the most part, Heartless don’t attack the more crowded areas of Twilight Town, so it’s the safest place to be with three non-fighters. There’s also the fact that the whole reason they had gone to the mansion was because of a stoned segue in thought from checking out the closed pizza place location. 

It is after their third loop around the common, however, that Kairi realizes no one knows where they’re going.

“Sure is weird that you can’t remember the name of this place or where it used to be,” she says.

“Is it though?” Axel asks.

“I think so.”

“What do you guys remember about it?”

Hayner remembers shooting three pointers in the arcade after stuffing his face with twelve slices of a triple meat-zza. Olette remembers that it had a glow in the dark theme with stars and planets. Pence remembers breadsticks. Axel remembers getting into a fight there because some blond weirdo in a beanie started making fun of his friend’s organization cloak.

“Seifer,” the Twilight Town trio sigh in unison.

“Who?”

“Hold on, lemme just text him,” Hayner groans. “Maybe where he fought a giant ginger.”

While they wait for a response Hayner explains that Seifer is what happens when a hall monitor tries to take their duties outside of school (“Except not funny like that SpongeBob episode” he sighs), but basically, they had to exchange numbers for a project once school started up again and Hayner had used the opportunity to send Seifer as many NSFW things as he could.

“Oooh, what kinda porn?” Axel demands, snatching the phone. After scrolling up a couple times he frowns, “These are just gifs of people standing on spinny chairs.”

“Which isn’t _safe_ for work,” Hayner laughs. “It pisses him off so bad.”

The phone chirps and Axel shows everyone the message which reads: 

_It was over on 3 rd, I think? _

_Don’t remember the name though._

_Also, stop texting me, chickenwuss_

“We’re half a block away then,” Olette cheers.

“Onward to investigate the mysterious pizza place that none of us can fully remember for some reason,” Pence says, striking a pose straight out of a Sentai show. Kairi mirrors him since no else does. The trio lead the way which gives Kairi the chance to hang back with Axel.

“Hey, Axel,” 

“Lea.”

“Hey, Lea,” she amends. “You said that Seifer guy was making fun of your friend’s organization cloak, right?”

“He called us Evanescence wannabes,” Axel says. “Which doesn’t even make sense since this visual aesthetic doesn’t resemble Evanescence in the slightest.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kairi agrees. “Obviously. I woulda pegged you as MCR fans.”

Axel boops her on the nose, “You’re lucky we’re friends now, Kairi.”

“Right! Friends!” Kairi says, clapping her hands together. “Who were you at the pizza place with?” 

Axel starts to respond but pauses. A dark look clouds his face and before Kairi can ask for clarification or apologize or do anything, really, Pence is tugging them towards a boarded-up building.

“I think this is the place!” he exclaims

Kairi is underwhelmed. It hasn’t been that long since the place was closed down—a few months at the most—but the building looks as if it had been gutted out years ago. The paint is obviously stripped—Kairi sees some leftover flecks of bright red and white clinging for dear life to a wall—and all relevant signage is missing. 

“Well, dang, tell us how you really feel Detective Kairi,” Axel says.

“Please tell me I wasn't saying that all out loud again.”

“Then I’ll leave it all up to implication.”

The group stares at the building for a few seconds that become minutes. And then Kairi’s stomach growls. She remembers why they came to this place... in the first place. Wants to ask Axel if they can just settle and grab, like, a box of Little Debbie’s and ollie outie back to Yen Sid’s tower before anyone starts blowing up their Gummiphones. But she sees something inside the empty pizza place. A figure is standing inside waving at them surrounded by the glowing eyes of several low-level Shadows.

“Hayner, did that weed contain any kind of hallucinogen?” Axel asks, but by the way he already has his keyblade summoned lets Kairi know what he thinks.

“Round two,” she says.

To say that the fight ends quickly would be disingenuous to say the least. After all, to say that it ended quickly would be to imply that there was even a fight to begin with. The figure inside the pizza place twitches and in a second the shadows all seem to coalesce into a singular, writhing form. They explode from the window as if they were a geyser or lava or some other natural phenomenon that is simultaneously beautiful and harmful. Kairi realizes if this whole “seven pure lights” thing doesn’t work out, then she should be a poet or something.

Of course, it is while she starts planning pennames that the tide of Heartless becomes a hand and drags her into the dilapidated building. The sensation of hundreds of Heartless touching her—pulling her along as if she were crowd surfing, really—is a nightmare that can only be matched by the one where she gives a presentation at school and tries to imagine the class in their underwear to feel less nervous, but they all came to school naked and everyone laughs at her because she’s the only one wearing clothes.

Kairi doesn’t linger on that thought for long though. She can’t. The Heartless are dragging her deep into darkness, after all. Her hands are bound and covered, so every time she tries to summon her keyblade, it falls back down. _Damseled once more and cut off from the single tool for freedom_ , she thinks in less precise words than this prose chooses to represent.

But then everything is hot. Plumes of flame erupt in multiple direction, obliterating Heartless. Something new envelops her. It’s cloth and black—Axel’s cloak.

“Let’s get outta here,” he says, practically in her ear.

With her hands free, Kairi summons her keyblade and unleashes the most powerful blizzard spell she can muster. The heat in the dilapidated building is instantly supplanted and the Heartless struggling to rejoin their companions somehow are sealed within blocks of ice. The only thing completely unaffected by the fire and ice is the figure now standing a foot away from them. 

“And here I wanted to do this the easy way,” the figure says in a voice that is all too familiar. 

Kairi lunges for him, but he’s too fast. The moment that her keyblade should have pierced his chest is when she finds herself stepping into a corridor of darkness.

“Oh no you don’t,” Axel says. He pulls her back by the hood, but the gravitational force from the corridor is too great. They’re both sucked in, tumbling deep into darkness.

* * *

When Kairi comes to, she tastes dirt in her mouth. And weed, but that might have been a bit too self-explanatory for her to take stock of.

“I dunno, princess, weed and dirt is a pretty fine combo considering,” Axel says

“I really need to work on keeping my inner monologue inner.”

“Please don’t,” he snickers. “It’s so much fun knowing what you’re really thinking.”

Kairi picks up a nearby dirt clod and throws it at Axel. He lets it smack against his hair. Or at least Kairi assumes that he does since Axel is pretty fast and the way he isn’t flinching or wincing at the giant dirt clod messing up his hair. 

“Aw geez, Axel,” she says, picking the disparate clumps out.

“Lea.”

“Oh my God, Lea, is that why your hair is so big? To hide your ears?” 

Axel’s ears are huge. He tugs on them and makes a silly face. It’s almost cartoonish how large his ears are which is funny since she knows that Sora can summon fricking Dumbo from the ether or whatever is inside summon gems. Kairi pauses. Holds a hand to her mouth because she doesn’t need Axel laughing at her again for the strange thoughts her brain train keep following.

“Do you know where we are?” she asks instead.

“Judging from the trees and the cheetah—”

“Cheetah?!?”

“—carefully watching us in the bushes over there,” he points over his shoulder. “We’re probably in Deep Jungle.”

“I’m sorry, how are you so casual about a cheetah watching us?”

Kairi summons her keyblade and aims it at the bushes where she thinks the cheetah is hiding. She doesn’t really see anything. Not even so much as a tiny rustle to signal a presence. A thunder spell would take care of it, but Kairi knows that even she isn’t precise enough to hit only the thing that she cannot see in a jungle with multiple forms of life that could get caught in the crossfire.

“Well, we’ve been out cold for at least fifteen minutes and I woke up ten minutes ago to green eyes staring at me, so, best bet? Our spotted friend is pretty sure we’re a threat and is waiting for us to leave.”

“And why haven’t we?”

Axel holds up a set of keys, “I let the Gummi ship know where we are, but it’s taking a while to get here since I doubt the thing was made to run at high speed on autopilot.”

That sounds about right—and Kairi doesn’t know enough about Gummi ships to refute it—so she sits back down in the dirt. Even though Axel claimed the cheetah wasn't going to attack, Kairi keeps her keyblade at the ready. He, on the other hand, starts rummaging through his cloak which is still wrapped around Kairi’s shoulders. 

“What’re you doing?”

“Getting this,” he pulls a gallon sized Ziplock bag from the inside of the right sleeve. “So we have something to do while we wait.”

“Do you even have a bong?”

“Other sleeve, princess.”

She shrugs her way out of the cloak. Passes it back to Axel because he really does look strange without it. He produces the bong from the other sleeve which makes Kairi worry about how many hidden pockets the cloak must have.

But that line of thought doesn’t stay long.

It doesn’t take long to get themselves set up and smoking. Since this is the fourth time Kairi within the day that she’s smoked a bowl with Axel, she wonders if she’s becoming a stoner or if he’s a particularly bad influence. Kairi is old enough to know the concept of gateway drugs is bullshit, but young enough that the D.A.R.E training is still ringing in her ears regardless. She claps her hand over her mouth the moment she notices Axel giving her an odd look.

“No, princess, you didn’t say anything funny and embarrassing,” he sighs. “I’ve been asking you who you think sent us here.” 

Kairi nods, absently, and explains the not-Sora she saw in the mansion. And then the abandoned pizza place (“Oh, right, I still owe you a pizza,” Axel says.) had that mysterious figure. 

“I couldn’t see his face, but it might’ve been him too,”

“How do we know you didn’t hallucinate an evil Sora? We are stoned out of our minds four times over,” Axel says. She must pull a face because he puts a hand up, “I’m not doubting you, it’s just—how do we make seeing the Sora clone jive with us being high and without sounding cray.”

“We can figure that out later,” Kairi says. “Why’d he send us _here_?”

“From what I remember, this world is pretty isolated,” Axel says, taking a long drag—inhale? Puff? Kairi isn’t really sure what verb adequately describes what they’re doing—“Like there’s only three people here and the animals. Heck, the Heartless here even left.”

Kairi takes back the bong, “That... doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s like copyright nonsense.”

“That makes even less sense.”

“It’s a metaphor, Hazel Grace—”

“My name is Kairi.”

“And mine is _Lea_ , but yeah, it’s like copyright nonsense,” Axel says. He holds his hands out like the guy from that one History Channel meme about aliens. “Copyright prevents crossovers and, like, isn’t that what all our adventures are when you think about it?”

“So… you’re saying that there is a literal copyright order isolating this world from the others?” Kairi asks.

Axel looks off into the distance like a character in a television show breaking the fourth wall, “ _Goodness_ no, that’d be _ridiculous_!” [3]

“Mmmkay...” Kairi murmurs, unconvinced. “So, we’re isolated with a cheetah watching us and a mysterious Sora clone—”

“That isn’t Roxas.”

“That isn’t Roxas—oh my god how did I forget about that guy?”

“Memory magic and being incredibly stoned.”

“ _Right_. Anyway, we’ve got a mysterious guy who can control Heartless after us who marooned us on a world that’s isolated due to ‘copyright issues’ or whatever. Am I missing anything?”

“No,” another voice says in her ear. “You seem to have it all down. Nice summation by the way.”

Kairi swings her keyblade, fast twitch muscles ready for this moment despite the dulling stupor of the weed and strikes nothing. A tiny pop echoes through the jungle and the mysterious figure from before appears in front of them. Kairi realizes the reason why she couldn’t make out his face in the dark building is that he’s wearing a mask. Something like a cross between a biker or sentai helmet. The figure reaches for a pair of clasps at the side and removes the mask. 

“Sora?” Axel exclaims.

“Not exactly,” the not-Sora sighs.

Despite the arch tone of his voice, Kairi isn’t able to parse the ironic tenor of his words. Everything about him screams Sora, but not. The face is the same, but the expression is twisted into a sneer. The hair is the same, but it’s blue-black instead of brown. The clothes—It is in this moment that Kairi is able to fully take stock of his outfit. All black with red trim to suggest veins or musculature. A bomb ass battle skirt held up by a two-belt combo. And the boots—

“Why is she listing out what I’m wearing?”

“Side effect of the weed, edgelord Sora,” Axel explains. “Makes her inner monologue external or whatever.”

“He’s wearing the Chanel boots, Axel!” Kairi screeches. 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, this weirdo looks fierce and all, but we really should focus up.”

“Hmm,” the not-Sora says. He holds up three fingers, “Well, first of all, thanks; my master and I worked really hard on this look. Second,” he pauses to point at Axel. “I don’t care what Saix thinks of you; if you interfere again, I’ll kill you.”

Axel and Kairi give each other a look that attempts to be surreptitious, but due to their altered state of consciousness betrays their combined confusion to their attacker.

“You held up three fingers,” Axel says. “Don’t you have a third thing?”

“Maybe he’s gonna tell us his name,” Kairi suggests. 

“Don’t you recognize me?” he asks, gesturing to his face. He tries to make his voice sound more Sora-like, but the cadence of his delivery is off. “How much did you smoke, Kairi?”

“Dude,” she says, offended. However, this round of weed chooses to hit her at this exact moment

“ _Dude_ ,” Axel echoes.

“Duuuude.”

“Du-du-du-du-du-du-du-dude.”

The not-Sora groans and holds out his hand. A keyblade that looks like a steampunk loser’s wet dream (“ _Excuse me?_ ” not-Sora howls.) manifests in his hands. He does a little half step and vanishes in a flash—or whatever the opposite of flash is—of darkness. A shadow appears overhead, Kairi instinctively throws up her keyblade and deflects a blow from the not-Sora’s keyblade. She tries to use the force of their clash to send him flying over to Axel, but he vanishes again. A twig snaps from behind and Kairi turns to meet her assailant yet again. He smirks.

“Oh, so the damsel in distress learned a few things?” not-Sora snickers.

“What? I’m not a— ”

He vanishes again, but this time Kairi feels the encroaching of a sudden burst of heat. She assumes Axel’s finally gotten in on the fight and pays it no mind while she tries to figure out where the not-Sora went, but gets a fireball to the back for her trouble. A quick Cura fixes that up so she whirls on Axel to tell him to watch where he’s throwing fireballs but he’s Flynn-ing against an obvious shadow clone.

“Whaa...?”

Another fireball hits her in the back.

“You really need to pay attention, Kairi,” not-Sora whispers in her ear. 

She swings and hits nothing. Casts another Cura. The not-Sora has to be a teleporter. It’s wild how many bad guys have “being able to spontaneously teleport wherever” in their powerset. Kairi wonders why literally none of the ostensibly good keyblade warriors she knows can do anything like that. Maybe, she considers, it’s like how in video games the bosses have abilities in fights that would break the story if used elsewhere?

“Nerrrd,” the not-Sora jeers as he slashes his weird keyblade in the direction of her head.

Kairi casts Gravira and makes his keyblade a thousand times heavier which stops his attack mid arc. He struggles for a second to lift it before giving up and throwing a punch. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Kairi shouts. “Time out! Time out! Axel he just tried to punch me!”

Axel runs through the shadow clone with his keyblade, “He did _what_? Dude, not cool.”

“ _So_ not cool!” 

“C’mon, Kairi, stop fighting and just let me kidnap you,” the not-Sora says.

“Uh...” Axel raises his hand. “But then, wouldn’t that _not_ be a kidnapping?”

“Excuse me?”

Kairi jumps in, “I mean, we’re stoned, but even we know ‘to kidnap’ implies that the kipnappee isn’t willingly going along with their kidnapper.”

“But I’m _threatening_ you.”

“True but begging me to come with you kinda-sorta undermines that.”

The Gravira spell deactivates and not-Sora vanishes again. Kairi rolls out of the way so she can get back-to-back with Axel. This way they can cover more ground and fight more efficiently on the defensive. A shadow crosses from overhead and they both raise their keyblades to block the coming onslaught. But instead of feeling not-Sora’s strike, two things happen. First, they hear a somewhat familiar song echoing through the jungle.

“Is that Reveille?” Kairi asks.

“Yes, Kairi, I think it is,” Axel says.

“ _Why_ am I hearing Reveille?”

“Oh, snap, the Gummi ship must be here.”

Second, the Gummi ship rams into the not-Sora while he’s mid teleport, which sends him flying. He’ll probably be fine though. Since she knows that the laws of physics don’t _really_ apply to them all that consistently, Kairi hopes he lands miles away. 

“Well, here’s our ride,” Axel says scrambling up towards the cockpit.

“Are we gonna make-a like a tree and leaf?” Kairi asks when he offers a hand to help her in.

Despite the fact that the not-Sora could come back at any second to continue in his quest to kidnap Kairi, they take a couple minutes to laugh at her stupid joke. Or, rather, they start laughing and can’t stop because apparently Newton’s first law apparently applies to laughter while stoned. Once they do calm down, Axel gets them in the air pretty easily. Kairi surveys Deep Jungle one more time before they hit escape velocity just to see if she can figure out where the not-Sora lands. Instead, she sees something come out of the bushes in the clearing they had been in.

“Axel,” she whispers for some reason.

“Lea.”

“Lea,” she says. “The thing watching us was a _leopard_.”

He gives her withering look, “Well, excuse me for not being a zoologist.”

She laughs, “You’re excused.”

* * *

It is about ten minutes after they are safe in Gummispace that Kairi’s stomach loudly growls. Axel gives her a look.

“No,” she says. “We can’t stop. That weirdo is probably gonnashowupagain!”

“Kairi, the tower is half an hour away,” Axel replies. “But the nearest world with a drive-thru is less than five”

Kairi mulls it over. Worst case scenario: the not-Sora attacks while they're in line or something, but most worlds have magic users, so they'd at least have backup or—

“Wait a second,” she says. “How are we supposed to use a drive thru in this?”

Axel holds up a finger as if he were going to start a sanctimonious tirade. Puts it down when he—Kairi assumes—realizes that she's right. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. 

“Well, this sucks,” he declares. “I just wanted us to have a fun stoner comedy adventure, not a regular day in the life of the battle between good and evil adventure.”

“It's not your fault that, even now, everyone wants to kidnap me,” Kairi replies, darkly.

She summons her keyblade and gives it the once over. When Riku had handed it to her back in the Castle That Never Was, she'd thought it was the key—pun fully intended—to get freedom. But now the bright colors, flower decal, and soft edges make it feel weak. Kairi barely wants to think it, but there's a tiny voice in her head certain that if she had a more showy or versatile keyblade like Riku or Sora everything would be different. Or at least that it wouldn't serve as a visual reminder that she's the girl™️ and that the girl™️ is only supposed to pine or cry or be kidnapped or whatever other things that leave her powerless and alone.

“Isn't being high supposed to make you feel happy?” she sighs.

Axel shrugs, “It's supposed to make you high. How you feel after that is up to you, unfortunately.”

“Well, ain’t that the epistemological rub,” Kairi says.

“Don’t you mean ontological?”

“Narratological?”

“Phenomenological?”

“Tautological?”

“ _Scatalogical_?”

“How long are we gonna keep this up?”

“How many words ending in ‘logical’ do you know?”

“My word a day calendar was on a roll back in June.”

“Oh, cool. Mine too.”

They continue their word game, undaunted by growling stomachs or fear of weirdos probably working for the new Organization XIII. They don’t even stick to words ending in “logical” after a few rounds because that isn’t really the point. The point is enjoying the feel of the word as it is said and the sound of the complimentary word.

And then a wormhole opens up right in front of them.

Wormhole travel is like feeling the force of eight Graviga spells at once all the while being shot out of one of those slingshot rides from a carnival for three seconds. The sensation is normally pretty intense but being stoned somehow magnifies the experience. It feels both longer and shorter. Faster and slower. Hotter and colder. And so on. Until Kairi’s body and mind rejoin in their ability to perceive their surroundings.

The Gummi ship has stopped but Kairi is still tingling. Though that might partially be because of the low fuel alarm blaring all around the cockpit. She covers her ears and focuses on what’s going on just outside the windshield. The world right in front of them is barely registering to her mind despite how familiar it looks. Jutting white skyscrapers and towers emblazoned with a strange symbol. 

“Well, smack my ass and call me Zell Dinct,” Axel groans.

“Why would I do that?” Kairi asks.

“Do what?”

“Smack your ass and call you Zell Dinct.”

“ _It’s an expression_ , Kairi,” Axel explains. “Saying, ‘holy fucking shit we’re almost out of fuel and the only place we can land is on The World That Never Was’ is kinda a mouthful.”

Kairi looks at Axel and then back to the world looming ahead of them. 

“You have _got_ to be kidding me.”

* * *

They land with as much grace as a practically empty tank will allow in a gas station deep within the Dark City. Axel explains that despite the fact that all of the Organization members could teleport through dark corridors, Xemnas had a few Gummi ship fuel stations built to help the scouts who had to scout new worlds. 

“That sure is convenient for us,” Kairi says.

“Totes,” Axel agrees. “But don’t think too hard about it.”

She follows him out into the parking lot. The fuel station is set up almost exactly like a normal gas station so Kairi figures this’ll be the perfect opportunity to learn something new about the Gummi ship like, for example, what powers it exactly. Some kind of fossil fuel? Dark matter? Once Sora explained that the Gummi ship ran on smiles, but when she looked over his shoulder to get confirmation on that from Donald and Goofy they made these weird contrite “yikes” faces and Chip and Dale were even less reliable sources of info since they were so difficult to find due to being less than eight inches tall.

Outside tending the various instruments are a couple low level Nobodies. Kairi starts to reach for her keyblade, but Axel stays her hand.

“They won’t bother us if we don’t start waving those around,” he says.

“How do you know that?”

Axel gives the pair of Dusks a little wave. They perk up for a second, swaying and undulating as all low-level Nobodies do, and then get back to their work. Kairi stares at them for a few more seconds until she’s at least mostly certain that the Dusks are completely unbothered by their presence.

“Okay, so why are they working at a gas station if there’s no one here?” Kairi asks.

Axel shrugs, “Now that we know Nobodies can develop hearts of their own, I’m pretty sure it’s a going through the motions thing. Who knows? Maybe in a few years this’ll be a city full of people again.”

Kairi doesn’t want to think about the metaphysics of that so instead she helps Axel carry the fuel pump nozzle thingy over to the appropriate place on the Gummi ship. Then they plug in a couple giant power cords to outlets below the backup thrusters. After that Axel has her make sure the Gummi ship is fully on the charging pad.

“What does this thing even run on?” she groans, even more confused.

Axel starts explaining but the words all blur together into “blah blah blah” to Kairi’s ears. She makes a note to ask Axel again when she isn’t stoned or otherwise mentally checked out. He seems to be getting into something especially complex when Kairi notices that there are more Nobodies watching them.

In addition to the two Dusks that were working she spies at least four Samurai, six Assassins, and one of some other type that she can’t identify off the top of her head. Unlike the two Dusks, who are watching them in their own low-key manner, the other Nobodies are completely still and unabashedly staring.

“Axel, Axel, look,” she whispers.

“It’s Lea.”

Kairi takes him by the shoulders and turns him to face the growing crowd of Nobodies. 

“Oh,” Axel says. “Just between you and me, they probably recognize me.”

“Are they gonna attack us?”

Axel gives them a little wave. Once more the Dusks undulate and sway in acknowledgement, but the others continue their statue game. Kairi makes to summon her keyblade, but Axel stops her. He takes a step forward towards the crowd of Nobodies. They take a single step forward as well. Kairi hears a strange buzzing. The Nobodies with mouths—the Dusks—open and close their mouths as if they were speaking. 

“Slow down. I can’t fully understand you anymore because of this,” Axel points to his heart.

The Dusks look at each other and continue to speak. Kairi doesn’t move a muscle for fear that if so much as a single finger on her hands fings the Nobodies will drop talking to Axel and decide to attack them. But they stay in position while Axel listens and occasionally responds[4] . Finally, one of the Samurai makes a familiar gesture by touching its thumb and index fingers together and bringing them to where its mouth should have been. Axel laughs and the assorted fuel pumps, cords, and pad all chime.

“Well, that’s us,” he says to the crowd. “See you later.”

The crowd of Nobodies disperse and Axel shuffles Kairi back onto the Gummi ship. He sits back down at the steering wheel and grips it tight.

“Uh... so what was that?”

“Just some old Nobodies that I used to command,” Axel says after a minute. “They wanted to know where I’d been and what it’s like having a heart again.”

“Oh. _Oh_.”

“Yup,” Axel sighs. “It was like going back to your hometown after being away for a long time and everyone is still the same but after a few conversations you realize that they had placed all these hopes and dreams on you when you left and...”

Axel trails off. Kairi doesn’t know that feeling at all. It’s probably because of her convenient amnesia regarding her pre-Destiny Islands life. Perhaps there’s someone—or a whole life—waiting for her back in Radiant Garden, but even then, Kairi would feel mostly distant as opposed to anything else. Y’know, due to the amnesia.

“I guess,” Axel says finally. “They kinda reminded me of the actually pretty terrible good ol’ days in the Organization with Roxas and Saix and X—”

Axel pauses again. Screws up his face as if he’s forgotten something, but then remembered something tangential and incorrect related to the forgotten thing. He shakes his head like a dog getting water out of its fur and holds up a little baggie.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Kairi says.

“I used to have my squad patrolling the universe for the dankest shit,” he says with a grin. “And even now, they don’t disappoint.”

Kairi snatches the baggie, “We can smoke again when we get somewhere safe.”

Axel nods, “Well, there’s a shortcut wormhole to Radiant Garden nearby and if you do most of the talking, we might be able to get Leon’s crew to protect us while we get something to eat.”

Her stomach chooses this moment to gurgle. Well, not so much as gurgle but make what would sound like a person with a very deep voice imitating the sound of vocal fry but not really getting it right due to their low register. 

“Do you think they have a White Cas—”

Axel covers her mouth. He has a manic look in his eye kinda like he did when he explained why Deep Jungle was empty, “Shh! Do you wanna get sued?”

She shakes her head no.

“Besides, I still owe you pizza,” he says.

“Okay. Pizza and then we go back to the tower.”

* * *

Instead of getting pizza they end up smoking a bowl with Aerith and Merlin.

Immediately after they landed in front of the Bailey, Merlin had appeared and whisked them away back to his little cottage where Aerith was already waiting in tow. 

“We’ve been waiting all day for you to get here,” he had explained.

“You knew we were coming?”

Merlin wiggled his fingers and a copy of The Once and Future King dropped into Kairi’s lap. Were she not four layers deep stoned, Kairi would probably have started banging her head on a nearby wall in frustration at yet another meta joke that she could not understand.

“Merlin said Lea was going to be bringing some special kush,” Aerith had said, giving them both big hugs. “Is that true?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Axel had replied. “We’re just here to—”

“Get the pizza,” Merlin interrupted. “I know. And I also know where the pizza place you’re looking for is.”

And so: with that, Axel retrieved his bong, packed some of the new weed his Nobodies had given him into it, and started the fifth time they would smoke today. 

Which brings us to now.

“Has she been doing that all day?” Aerith asks. It’s her turn with the bong.

Kairi blinks, realizing that she had been narrating her inner monologue again, “Weed gives me stream of consciousness disease.”

Aerith gives an airy nod right before tossing her head back. Four perfect smoke rings rise from her mouth. With her free hand, Aerith plucks a plastic flower from a nearby vase and pokes its stem through the hole. Axel whistles appreciatively.

“Beautiful and talented, is there nothing you can’t do Aerith?” he asks.

She puts both hands-on Axel’s shoulders and levels a serious glare at him, “Snap my fingers.”

Axel snaps his fingers—though it is only at this moment that Kairi wonders how he can do that despite wearing those gloves. Magic probably.

While Axel and Aerith snap their fingers at each other, Kairi watches Merlin take the bong. She’s not sure how, exactly, but he smokes weed just like one might imagine a wizard would. His beard keeps getting in the way every other second and she considers offering to help him with that but remembers that he still hasn’t told them where the pizza place is. Oh, wait.

“So how do you know where the pizza place is?” she asks.

“Hmm?” Merlin says, finally exhaling a plume of smoke and passing the bong to her. “I don’t know where it is.”

“But you said—”

“Ah, ah, ah, my dear,” he says, pointing to the bong. Kairi takes a hit to be polite. “I don’t know where the pizza place is, but I remember that you two will get there later today and what I’m supposed to do to help you get there.”

“You... remember?”

“They don’t call it Merlin Sickness for nothing.”

“Let’s pretend that I’m not one of the ‘they’ and don’t know what that is.”

“Ah, yes,” Merlin pulls three tiny chess pieces—a pawn, a rook, and a bishop—from his sleeve. “Most people experience their lives from beginning to end, remembering their pasts.” he taps the chess pieces in ascending order. “But my magic lets me do the opposite.”

“Wow, that sucks,” Kairi says.

“Does it?”

She pauses. Kairi isn’t exactly sure why she said that. Everyone wants to know the future to some extent, no matter the mechanics of getting that prognosticative knowledge. But also the idea of remembering the future events and then going along with them rubs her the wrong way like how walking a mile with a single pebble in her shoe would.

“I mean, if you always know what you’re going to do, isn’t your whole life the result of your magic shoving you into some predetermined role?” Kairi says slowly, discovering her opinion as the words fall from her lips.

Merlin mulls this over for a moment. Or perhaps he _remembers_ the direction that this conversation is supposed to take. Either way, he shrugs.

“That’s only a problem if you think ‘predetermined’ and ‘inevitable’ mean the same thing.”

“But… they do?” Kairi says. She hasn’t looked in a dictionary or anything, but this is something that she just knows thanks to having lived a human life in a world with pop culture. Merlin shakes his head at her and produces a rock from his sleeve. He tosses it in the air a couple time as if testing its weight before hurling it at his front window.

“What was that for?” Kairi shouts, wincing as broken glass falls.

“My window becoming broken was inevitable,” Merlin says. “I threw this rock at it and because of that choice I made, the glass was shattered. That’s inevitability. You make a choice and then the consequences that flow from that decision are going to happen unless something else interferes.”

Merlin snaps his fingers and—as if he had pressed rewind on a TV remote—the rock comes sailing back through the window and the window repairs itself. Once the rock lands back in his hand, Merlin vanishes it away instead of putting it back up his sleeve.

“So that’s your life?” Kairi asks. “It still sounds like you’re predetermined to make the choices your future selves make rather than choosing for yourself.”

“Predetermined by the choices that I decide to make, perhaps,” Merlin says. “But I have a feeling that your discomfort isn’t really about how I feel regarding the inevitable, hmm?”

“If you know, couldn’t you just tell me?”

“ _Or_ you could tell me about the young man you’re running from.”

“We’re not running. Exactly...” Kairi says. “It’s just he’s really strong and he looks like Sora and he wants to kidnap me for some reason—”

“Who doesn’t?” 

“ _I know, right?!?_ ” Kairi says. She raises her hands into the air as if praising some deity. “Like, it’s so weird how often I get kidnapped. Princess of heart or not, I’m not that special and I’m definitely not some damsel in distress that needs—”

Merlin places a hand on her shoulder. It’s tense and tight as if she were getting ready for a fight. She can feel that her fists are clenched and—Kairi looks down and sees that she’s summoned her keyblade. With a flick of her wrist, she sends it away again, but unfortunately for her the embarrassment she feels is still here.

“Did we miss something?” Axel asks. 

He’s in the middle of braiding Aerith’s hair and doing a terrible job. Aerith doesn’t look like she missed anything, however, and levels Kairi with a strange—probing?—look.

“I was just telling Kairi that to find the pizza place you’ll need to do a Moogle search on Ansem the Wise’s computer,” Merlin says, airy. He gives Kairi a look that she doesn’t know how to read. And then he winks.

“I don’t think Moogling the pizza place will help if I can’t remember its name,” Axel says.

“Ansem the Wise’s systems know a lot of impossible information,” Aerith explains. “Tron can help you with that.”

She gets to her feet, a bit wobbly, and offers Axel a hand to do the same. Kairi tries to stand, but her legs feel very heavy suddenly. All of her feels very heavy, actually. Though this doesn’t seem to be a stoned five times over thing. She looks to Merlin for confirmation, but he’s already waddled away to do whatever it is wizards do when they aren’t smoking weed. Turning little kids into animals, maybe?

A pair of hands take each of hers and Kairi is finally standing up with Axel and Aerith on either side of her. It is then that, once more, her stomach growls.

“Onward to pizza,” Axel says.

* * *

It doesn’t take long for Kairi to get her legs back (pun definitely intended). Once the trio starts heading for the Bailey she’s walking as if everything were normal again which is good because there are still a few Heartless here and there that the town’s security system hasn’t gotten yet in their way. 

Kairi dispatches them easily and with glee. Most of the Heartless they come across are little Shadows, but there’s something delicious about how being able to complete this simple task makes her feel strong and valorous and competent. 

But then again, they are Shadows. And is it really a mark of strength, valor, or competence that she can defeat what are essentially ants? Sora once described what it was like being a Shadow and he had said there was so little he could even d—Sora! 

Kairi has her keyblade leveled at one little Shadow and something about it reminds her of Sora. Though this time she’s sure that it isn’t him. The actual Sora is off trying to retrain after the whole Mark of Mastery nonsense. They stare each other down.

“Get out of here,” she finally says to the little creature which doesn’t seem to even register her words. 

It sinks into the ground and tries to steal her heart from behind because of course it does, but when she whirls around to attack, she is instead grabbed from behind by a pair of lanky, shadowy arms. Another Heartless?

“Kairi!” Axel calls. He summons his keyblade, ready to jump to her _rescue_. 

And that makes Kairi _angry_. A tiny light from within bubbles up and it is as if there were a hundred bombs exploding all around. The Heartless—a Neoshadow—loses its grip for a moment which gives Kairi the opportunity to strike. 

She does, and it evaporates into nothingness.

“Whoa, Kairi, are you okay?” Axel asks.

“I’m fine,” she growls, stabbing at the original Shadow. 

“No need to bite my head off, I was just trying to help,” he says. 

“What? Because you thought I couldn’t take care of myself?”

“Uh, no? Because a Heartless was about to drag you off _again_.”

She gestures to the empty space where her assailant used to be, “And how’d that work out?”

“Well, excuse me, princess, fo—”

“Excuse me,” Aerith says. 

Her voice is exactly at conversation tone, but something about that makes her seem more authoritative. Aerith sits down on a nearby pile of rubble. It’s clear that she wants them to sit as well. Axel joins her, but Kairi feels more comfortable on her feet right now. 

“Y’know, this reminds me of what happened after Sephiroth killed me,” Aerith says after a few moments.[5]

“He did what now?” Kairi and Axel say in unison.

“I got better; it’s _fine_ ,” Aerith insists. “But after Sephiroth killed me, I was stuck being defined by getting killed by some DNAlien edgelord. Like, no one remembered all the cool stuff about me or the bad stuff about me. It was all, ‘Oh Aerith is so good and kind and perfect and passive and holier than thou’ which, y’know, sucked.”

“So, what did you do about it?” Kairi asks

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Aerith clutches her stomach.

“I mean, it didn’t even really happen to _me_ , per se,” Aerith says. She pushes her bangs out of her face, “All that is some _other_ Aerith’s problem, but _I’m_ stuck dealing with the fallout, y’know?”

Kairi isn’t sure if Aerith is too stoned or has the same kind of thing happening to her as Merlin’s whole “remembering my life backwards” deal. Both are too horrifying to comprehend.

“Gonna be honest, you lost me after you said Sephiroth killed you, but that it was a different Aerith actually,” Axel says. 

“That’s fine, sometimes I don’t get it myself,” Aerith laughs. “But what I _do_ get it feeling weighed down by other people’s perception of you and being, like, stripped of agency because of that.”

“And I’m guessing you don’t do anything about that feeling either,” Kairi says, uncharacteristically bitter.

“There’s nothing for me to do,” Aerith replies with a carefree shrug that seems practiced somehow. “How people treat me and what I do with my life writ large are two separate things, no matter how much some try to marry the two concepts.”

The three of them take a few seconds to mull that over. Then.

“ _Oh_ ,” Axel says finally. “Kairi, your friends helping you doesn’t strip you of agency.”

“I don’t thi—”

“I think her anger is more about feeling a lack of control due to getting kidnapped a lot,” Aerith chimes in. “It might be a PTSD thing.”

“Oh, _Kairi_!” Axel says, concerned. “You need a hug. Let me hug you.”

“What?”

“I heard people need at least twelve hugs a day for good mental health,” Aerith supplies.

“What?” Kairi squeaks

“And here I’ve only been giving her zero,” Axel sighs. “C’mon and get this hug, Kairi.”

“Uh...”

Axel stands up and holds out his arms, “Walk into the hug, Kairi.”

Kairi walks into the hug without an ounce of reluctance. If there’s anything Kairi can admit to herself it’s that when the going gets tough, the tough (her) would like a hug every now and then. Running across the universe—while stoned—looking for pizza and being chased by an evil doppelganger of a friend definitely counts as tough. Axel’s embrace is warm, which makes sense considering his whole fire elemental deal.

“Mmmkay, now that we’re all friends again,” Aerith says, stepping between them and linking her arms with theirs. “We’re here.”

Kairi has no idea how she didn’t notice the giant castle looming literally right above them and chalks her lack of awareness up to being stoned. Aerith guides the three of them to a side entrance next to a little courtyard and leads them through a snaking set of catacombs beneath the castle. Right before they enter an important looking door, Aerith reaches into her purse and pulls out a spray bottle of Febreze that shouldn’t have been able to fit in there.

“Like with perfume, you gotta spray, delay, and walk away,” she says.

“Call me crazy—” Axel begins.

“Crazy,” Aerith interjects.

“—but why are you about to spray us with Febreze?”

Aerith leans on the door, “Leon’s kinda straight-edge and he can get kinda uptight if he smells weed.”

“Do we really smell that bad?” Kairi asks, venturing to smell her shirt. 

It smells like a shirt.

Aerith waves her hand dismissively, “Ehhh, besides Merlin said the Febreze was necessary to help you find the pizza place.”

Before either Axel or Kairi can call bullshit or ask why a bottle of Febreze would help, the Leon opens the door. Like some kind of gut reaction, Aerith sprays everyone and a cloud of Apple Spice & Delight descends upon them.

“ _Aerith_ ,” Leon growl-coughs. “I thought we agreed you’d stop smoking.”

“I don’t recall saying that...” Aerith says, passing the spray bottle off to Kairi. She gestures for Axel and Kairi to head into the computer room. Not wanting to get caught up in being shamed by a grown man dressed like the platonic ideal of a Spencer’s or Hot Topic for also being stoned, Axel and Kairi scurry inside. They brush past the study in disarray and Kairi sees the portrait of Ansem-Xehanort-Whoever leaning against a bookcase. On the other side of the room is a yet another hallway that leads into a hyper technological warehouse with a control room overlooking it. 

“Oh, right. This computer,” Axel says once they find themselves in the direct center of the control room.

“You’ve been here before?”

“Oh yeah,” Axel says. “Once before I joined the Organization and then again when I came back to life a while ago. I guess Ienzo, Aeleus, and Dilan are on lunch break or something?”

“You just said a bunch of words like you expected me to understand them,” Kairi says.

“They’re names.”

“That... doesn’t help either?”

Axel shrugs, “At least you didn’t have to watch another side, another story frame by frame to learn them.”

Kairi has no idea what that means either but decides to point out the giant Hal 9000 looking thing on the wall. It hums and pulsates exactly like a killer robot.

“I am neither a killer nor am I a robot,” it says.

If Kairi felt comfortable swearing, she would've.

“I take it you're Tron,” Axel says, strangely sanguine.

“And you are a pair of new users,” Tron replies. “If you have any questions, please type them into search bar on the terminal.” 

A spotlight shines down on a much more familiar looking computer and keyboard. Axel ambles over. Kairi follows, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the big glowing thing that claims it isn’t a killer robot. The last thing she needs is to get taken out like a chump against a killer robot because it _said_ it wasn't one.

“But I’m not a killer robot,” Tron replies. “I’m a computer program.”

“Right.”

“I promise.”

“ _Riiiight_.”

“Kairi, stop antagonizing the computer and help me,” Axel says.

Reluctantly—gingerly, even—Kairi shuffles over to the computer next to Axel, never taking her eyes off the killer robot. Axel sighs which makes her realize she said that aloud, but instead of apologizing she narrows her eyes at “Tron” and makes an “I’m watching you gesture” at the glowing red light.

Once more Axel sighs, but then he starts typing. Kairi spots a couple of the keywords he feeds into the search bar. Pizza place, Twilight Town, and themed. He presses the enter key with gusto. Tron buzzes and hums which puts Kairi back on her guard. She reaches out and her keyblade finds her outstretched hand. She leaps.

“Kairi, what are you doing?”

“I’m saving you from the killer robot!”

“But you’re on the floor.”

“I’m on the floor?”

“You’re on the floor, hon.”

“Am I at least kicking the floor’s butt?”

Both Axel and Tron snicker, “Of course you are.”

A pair of hands take Kairi by the arms and heave her up as if she were a ragdoll and sit her down on an empty space near the computer terminal. Axel points to the screen. His initial search got a few hits for places called Chuck E. Cheese, but Kairi can’t believe Axel could ever forget a place like this. There’s a singing mouse, just like the king! She figures Axel must think the same because he starts over the search with Twilight Town pizza within quotation marks. This search yields several hits but mostly for recipes written by stay-at-home moms from Twilight Town. 

Kairi wonders what her mom was like. Sure, she has the Mayor and his wife, but now that she knows she’s from some alternate magical dimension, Kairi can’t help but get vague twinges of curiosity about whatever life she left behind—lost?—after Radiant Garden got swallowed up by the darkness the first time.

Maybe, she considers, her mom was a stay-at-home mom. That would explain her own seemingly universally enforced habit of staying home while everyone else had adventures. 

“Axel,” she says, deciding not to follow that train of thought.

“Lea,” he replies.

“Lea, have you found it yet?”

“No, but I’m researching what used to be in that lot and seeing if that can help me out,” he says. “It may be a sign of the surveillance state but thank goodness for Moogle Maps street view.”

He points to the screen and Kairi sees a version of Twilight Town rendered through what looked like PS2 era graphics or something. She shivers at the thought of that particular visual period in video games. Axel clicks an arrow at the right-hand side of the screen a couple of times until it becomes clear that they’re looking at the street Hayner, Pence, and Olette had taken them down to find the pizza place. 

“Okay, this should be the—oh, come on!” Lea shouts.

Kairi takes a closer look at the screen. The building that she had almost been sucked into by a demon tide of Heartless is there. People seem to be going into the building and the lights are definitely on. One group of people who just so happened to be caught by the Moogle Maps camera are carrying out three pizza boxes stacked on top of each other. Everything seems fine to her until she notices the sign. 

“Why is the sign blurry?” she asks.

“Because this is a Naminé thing,” Axel replies, exasperated. “It all makes sense now. I can’t remember, those kids couldn’t remember, and the sign is inexplicably blurred out. Naminé did something and now the memories are gone.”

Kairi mulls this over for a moment. 

“But didn’t all the effects from her magic fade away after she fixed Sora?”

Axel mulls this over for a moment.

“Oh, right. Do we know anyone else with memory magic?”

“Memory magic.”

“Memory magic.”

“Memory magic.”

“Memory magic.”

“Memory ma—wait, why are we chanting memory magic?” Kairi asks.

“I dunno, I was just following your lead,” Axel says. “Besides it’s kinda fun to say.”

“It’s the alliteration.”

“Alliteration.”

“Excuse me,” Tron says. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but while you were chanting, I scanned other worlds for images similar to your search and may have found a version of your pizza place that is still in business.”

Kairi leaps from the console and hugs the air right in front of the glowing red light.

“She does know that I do not have a physical form in the User world, right?” Tron asks.

Axel waves noncommittally as he reads over the data Tron has projected onto the screen. A wicked smile spreads across his face. 

“Ah, Pizza Planet,” he says. “How quaint.”

He taps a few keys and Kairi hears something buzzing in the near distance. Another red light appears under the console and out of a little flap slides out a couple sheets of paper. _Oh, a printer_. 

With that finished, Axel collects them and stuffs the fruits of their research into his robe. He moves to leave but then—as if he’s remembered something like leaving the stove on while in the middle of a traffic jam on the way to his 9-to-5 job at the Blouse Barn or something—rushes back to the computer.

“Actually, while I’ve got you here Tron,” he begins. “What data do you have on Subject X?”

Tron’s light flickers, “I have no data on Subject X.”

“But she used to be here,” Axel says, with a strange amount of forcefulness.

Tron repeats himself and a trashcan nearby spontaneously combusts. Kairi quickly casts freeze on it—or rather in its general direction—to put out the small fire but more items start exploding around them as Axel keeps asking Tron questions about this mysterious Subject X and she can’t put them all out quickly enough before the lab’s fire alarms go off and then the sprinklers go off and then Leon rushes in to drag them both out and then he chews them out for smoking in the lab and then—

“Why does she keep saying ‘and then’?” Leon demands, pointing a finger at Kairi.

“This is just a running gag by now,” Axel huffs. “Get with it or get lost, pop-punk reject.”

“What did you just—” Leon starts. His hackles raise like a dog which is funny because he’s a very lion themed person. And then he takes a breath, “You know what? The two of you aren’t my problem. Get out of here.” 

Axel is about to say something else, but at that moment something explodes deep within the castle. The look on Leon’s face at that development is somehow worse than the manic rage of Xemnas, so Kairi drags Axel away even though he looks like he wants to run back in and yell at Tron some more. 

“So, what was that all about?” Kairi asks once their a safe distance away in the Bailey.

“What was what about?” Axel replies, airy.

“You set the lab on fire.”

He waves dismissively, “The weed is messing with my powers.”

“Sure. Right. I totally believe you,” she pauses. “That was me being sarcastic in case it wasn't obvious.”

Axel laughs, “I’m not that high.”

“So… what was that with the fire and the yelling at our killer robot friend?” Kairi asks, a bit firmer this time. “And don’t try to deflect by pointing out that Tron isn’t a killer robot.”

She punctuates that with a little shoulder check, but somehow Axel crumples a bit at that. It’s as if the charming facade that he calls a “self” falls away for a moment, but he doesn’t bother putting it back together as he speaks.

“When I was a kid me an’ Isa used to play around here,” he begins. “Sure, no one was supposed to mess around the philosopher-king’s lab/castle thingy, but back then Isa was pretty easy to convince. One day we accidentally broke a window—okay, I broke a window’ don’t look at me like that—and met Subject X.”

They’re back at the part of the bailey with all the rubble when he says this, and Axel takes a seat on the crumbling stairs in front of them and Kairi takes her place right beside him. He reaches inside his cloak and produces an old photograph. A selfie. It’s yellowed and fraying at the edges, but Kairi can see two figures—a younger Axel making a duckface and Saix looking especially severe—in front of a window where another shadow sits behind them.

“She wasn't a prisoner exactly, but she wasn't free either,” Axel continues. “Ansem the Wise had taken her in for research or whatever because of her amnesia and weirdly powerful heart. Me an’ Isa promised we’d help her escape, maybe take her out on the town or something, but by the time we finally broke in everything with Xehanort and the Organization was happening, and the world had fallen to darkness.”

Kairi nods slowly, “But what happened to Subject X?”

“We—I—still don’t know,” Axel sighs. “She was gone by the time we came to and Isa got it in his head that since the Organization had been the ones holding her, if we joined, they’d be our best bet of finding her.”

“You joined a death cult to find a girl?”

Kairi feels this twinge of kinship between Subject X and herself. It’s probably because this missing girl fits the recurring archetype of her life: mysterious girl being pursued by her two male friends, one headstrong and boisterous and the other brooding and prone to melancholy. Briefly Kairi wonders if whatever force that authors the universe’s existence is just an uncreative hack.

“We joined a death cult to find our _friend_. Pobody’s Nerfect,” Axel corrects. Frustration creeps into his voice, “Which, as you can see, didn’t really go anywhere since even Ansem the Wise’s computer that sees all apparently doesn’t even have data on her.”

And Kairi understands that feeling too, kind of. Back during her blank year—the year no one remembered Sora—she had felt same frustration as her brain told her that there was an absence in her life but refused to name it. Her life on the Islands consisted of exhausting every clue she could find about the missing part of her mind, but each one turned into another dead end. In retrospect, Kairi realizes she must have run into Sora’s mom thirty times that year without recognizing her. She wonders how forgetting and then suddenly remembering her only son felt for her. 

“So, now you know,” Axel says.

“Now I know,” Kairi echoes. Pauses. Realizes. “When all this is over—y’know, Xehanort and the Organization and whatever else is going on—how about we go look for her together?”

Axel playfully shoves her, “Now I know you’ve really transcended into the Nirvana of being stoned.”

“What? I’m being serious.”

“I know,” he says. “When you’re _really_ stoned you say unbelievably sincere things from the heart.”

“But our friend group says unbelievably sincere things from the heart all the time.”

“So, imagine my surprise when you were the only one to agree to let me smoke ‘em out.”

Kairi laughs at that. Riku is incredibly straight-edge, Sora would have a panic attack at the idea of doing something kinda-illegal, and she isn’t sure how Goofy or Donald would react but considering that they’re important members of a royal court they probably wouldn’t be down for the devil’s lettuce.

Axel stands up, dusting off his cloak. He tucks the photo back inside one of his many, many, many pockets and offers Kairi a hand up.

“I’ll take you up on that offer, but first we should probably go get that pizza place.”

* * *

It is only in retrospect that Kairi realizes that they probably shouldn’t have started smoking again once Axel got their Gummi ship out of Radiant Garden’s orbit. Not because smoking seemed to hinder any of the fine motor skills necessary to pilot. Honestly, the fact that—outside of tripping a couple times—it hadn’t hindered their fighting skills to the degree she would have expected it to has Kairi wondering how much of the D.A.R.E and after school specials about drugs were a load of bunk. 

But flying and smoking does make one not pay attention to certain accoutrements that one had put down for only a second to take their turn with the bowl and leave their partner also unable to catch it before it rolled down behind the brakes and gas pedals.

Perhaps the D.A.R.E specials weren’t bunk?

Anyway, once the bottle of Febreze is behind brake pedal, Axel is unable to slow down or stop the Gummi ship before it can collide with a giant asteroid. Kairi only has a second to brace herself before the shock sends the ship careening in the opposite direction if had been going. Had she not been wearing her seatbelt, Kairi’s pretty sure she would have faceplanted into the window. Instead, she’s snug as a bug in a rug re: her seat as the Gummi ship whirls and swirls and spins. Axel isn’t so lucky. He’s holding onto the steering wheel for dear life as the rest of him dangles and whips around like a cosmic ragdoll attempting to gain some degree of control in a universe that utterly does not wish to cede so much as an inch—

“Inches or millimeters?” Kairi screams.

“What?” Axel hollers back

“Just pick one. Inches or millimeters!”

“Fuck the metric system, I’m not a scientist!” Axel roars

—an inch in their existential game of cat and mouse. Kairi pauses. _Wow_. That was a lot of mixed metaphors right there. She grips the seat as tightly as possible with one hand and the bong with the other, which she realizes is the strangest set of priorities if there ever were any. 

“If I really wanted to keep this safe and hold on at the same time, I could just cast Zero Graviga on the cockpit which would—” Kairi mutters to herself. Pauses. Realizes. “Axel!”

“Lea!”

“Lea! I’m gonna cast Zero Graviga on the cockpit now!”

And she does. The spell doesn’t do anything to help _her_ since she’s firmly planted to the seat. Axel on the other hand—who must have let go upon realizing Kairi’s plan—floats unbothered in the center of the cockpit. 

“Shouldn’t you try to get us stabilized?”

He shakes his head, “We’re caught in some world’s gravitational pull and we’re gonna crash in a couple seconds.”

“What do you mean in a couple se—”

Just as Axel had foretold, they crash. Kairi feels the sudden jerk and skid and thudding sensations that signify that they’ve ended up on some kind of landmass. But they’re still rolling. Rolling and rolling as if the crash hadn’t done anything to dull the kinetic energy pushing them forward. 

Was all of AP physics bunk too?

And then the Gummi ship just stops. Well, crashing into a tree probably helped, but Kairi’s pretty sure that the ship is bigger and carries more mass so the tree should have been crushed due to the ridiculous amount of force that should have been exerted by an object that fell out of the sky.

“Yeah, your AP physics class might have been bunk,” Axel says after the Zero Graviga spell ends and he falls back down into his seat.

“Thanks, I’ll tell Mr. Whatshisface that after we save the universe and see if he just gives me an A+ for the rest of the year,” Kairi replies, finally unbuckling her seat belt.

After she gets the Febreze bottle and drops it in one of Axel’s many pockets, the two take their time surveying the ship. Doing diagnostic work is something that feels strangely nerve wracking while stoned six times over. Kairi’s mind starts to wander off from its task every couple of seconds and that could definitely lead to her missing some crucial element of the ship that could lead to them crashing again but this time burning up in the atmosphere of some other world because there the rules of physics that she worked really hard to learn so she could get a 5 on that AP test would actually apply there.

“Mmmkay,” Axel says in a way that let’s Kairi know she had said that all aloud too. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“Bad news first.”

“Our liftoff gear is broken.”

“Are you going to say the good news is that we’re alive?”

“I mean that _is_ good, but no,” Axel pauses. Ruminates. “Good news is that nothing else seems to be broken. If we can get in the air, we can get flying again and just beam down to worlds until we head back to Yen Sid’s tower.”

“So... should I cast another Zero Graviga?”

“Can you?”

* * *

Fifteen minutes and several attempts later Kairi realizes that she’s out of magic. She knows that she had only cast one Zero Graviga, one Gravira, and more than three Blizzard recently, and before they had left on this odyssey, she had been using a lot of magic in training with Axel that morning. He may be a one trick pony (“Hey!” Axel gasps.) when it comes to the kinds of magic he can do, but unlike Kairi he has a ridiculous amount of energy that he can pull from for spells. Kairi, however, does not. 

Sora had once said it was like Kairi was a level 10 red mage with access to level 90 spells. Sure, it was impressive, but she would (and did apparently) burn herself out pretty quick. Axel, on the other hand, was a former boss battle and thus had an inconsistent degree of skill, but always had More Energy Than You. 

“Do you know any fire spells that could help us out here?” she asks.

“Not unless you want the ship to explode,” Axel replies.

“That sounds fun!” says another voice from behind them.

Unlike her magic stores, Kairi’s ability to wave around a keyblade is limitless, so at the sound of this new presence she summons Destiny’s Embrace and lunges. The mysterious stranger—a red haired boy in green tights—just floats out of the way at the last second 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the boy says. “You don’t _hafta_ blow it up, I was just sayin’ it’d be _cool_ is all.”

“Thanks for the clarification, Robin Hood jr.,” Axel says. “Now could you tell us where we are?”

The boy laughs, “This is Neverland!”

He rises into the air to punctuate his gleeful declaration. And then Kairi remembers. Sora had said something about Neverland once. It was a place where kids never grew up and the Lost Boys who lived there were led by a boy named—

“Ohhhh, so _you’re_ Peter Pan,” she says.

“You’ve heard of me?”

“I thought you’d be taller.” 

“I’m pretty tall,” Axel interjects.

Peter Pan blows a raspberry, “That’s because you’re a grown-up.”

He flies in closer to examine Axel, looking him up and down. Kairi can’t help but giggle. No matter how useful the Organization cloak is, it still makes anyone wearing it look hella suspicious.

“Can’t really help the circumstances of my birth, Green Arrow.”

“I don’t get that reference.”

“Not my prob, Bob.”

“My name’s Peter Pa—”

“Anyway!” Kairi interjects. “It’s nice to meet you, Peter, but we’ve gotta get our ship in the air or else we’ll be stuck here forever.”

Peter floats over to the Gummi ship, surveying it as though he knew exactly how a Gummi ship was supposed to operate. For a second Kairi wonders if him seeing the Gummi ship violates the world order but decides against caring since with Xehanort on the loose more people at least having a general idea that other worlds exist might be a good thing. 

Back with the Gummi ship Peter raises his hands to his mouth and shoots up into the air as he crows like a rooster. A couple of seconds pass, but out from a forest Kairi hadn’t noticed come scampering a couple kids. Peter Pan definitely looks young, but these two can’t be older than ten. Peter shows them the Gummi ship and then floats back to Axel and Kairi. He wraps his arms around their shoulders. 

“No worries, once the Lost Boys figure out what to do, we’ll have you outta here in a flash,” Peter says. But then he sniffs. Once. Twice. “Both of you smell _really_ weird,”

Kairi freezes. The weed! Peter must be smelling the remnants of weed smoke on them! No matter what Sora said about Peter Pan, he’s still a little kid, and Kairi does not want to be a bad influence on a kid who will apparently stay a kid forever. Axel is about to say something—probably make another antagonistic reference that no one gets—so Kairi elbows him in the stomach to head him off.

“Crash landings do that to you,” she giggles because of course that’s all she can do right now. 

“... right,” Peter says. “Why’d you hit him though?”

“Yeah, Kairi,” Axel wheezes. “Why’d you hit me?” 

“I thought I saw a bug?” Kairi lies. Pauses. “Actually, me and Axel—”

“Lea.”

“Me and Lea are gonna go freshen up,” Kairi says. “We’ll be right back.”

Axel is surprisingly easy to drag away. It’s probably because he isn’t really putting up any kind of a fight. Or because Kairi has a better left hook than she thought. Either are valid explanations, really. Once they’re out of earshot, Kairi explains everything.

“I wasn't going to offer them any, Kairi,” Axel sighs. “Do you really think so little of me?”

“It’s not that,” Kairi replies. “It’s just... I have to be a good role model.”

Axel cocks his head to the side, “That’s the second time you’ve said that today re: smoking weed.”

“Is it?”

“It is.”

“Well, it’s true!” Kairi says. 

So what if she isn’t actually a princess with a long lost kingdom waiting for her? She’s still Kairi—the girl the mayor adopted, the girl charged with keeping those two boys with the swords out of trouble, the girl with a heart so pure an omnicidal (and deathless, apparently?) maniac ended the world just to get it. Whether she likes it or not, all eyes are always on her. 

This, it would seem, is the other role she is doomed to play. Exemplar on the pedestal. Still passive, but at least to the uncritical eye worshipped and revered. And isn’t that good? Isn’t it great to be so above it all? Immune to the childish antics and whimsy of her friends and grounded in real life. Distanced and removed from all the meaningless folly that could corrupt her. 

A small, selfish part of her wishes she were more like Sora. The people of the universe—all the friends he’s made and even his family back home—don’t care about who Sora is. They aren’t grappling with the particulars of his reputation. It’s all about what Sora _does_. 

And there goes the active/passive binary again.

“Please tell me I said all of that out loud,” Kairi mutters.

“For once, your inner monologue stayed on the inside,” Axel says, tapping her head. “But. If this is really important to you, Operation Pretend Not To Be Stoned is a go.”

“I don’t think we have to pretend since we’re acting pretty normal.”

“Kairi, your inner monologue.”

“Oh, right. That,” she pauses. “I was actually thinking of us using the Febreze so we don’t smell suspicious.”

Axel reaches into his cloak and produces the bottle. He readies it as if he were going to shoot her like a character in some gun-fu movie or something, but Kairi snatches it away. She fires two spritzes into the air, waits a second, and walks under the falling mist.

“Spray, delay, and walk away,” she explains, echoing Aerith.

“If you insist,” Axel sighs, copying her. 

Once Kairi is sure that they don’t smell too much like weed, she leads them back to the Gummi ship where Peter and his two Lost Boys are trying to push the Gummi ship away from the tree. Axel ambles over to join them in pushing, but Kairi hangs back. There’s no way they’ll be able to push the ship like _that_. When she notices a few downed tree branches and planks along the path where the ship had rolled, Kairi prays that AP physics will be real this time. 

She grabs the biggest branch she can find and takes it to thew ship, jamming it in a spot on the opposite side of where the others are pushing between the ground and the Gummi ship. Way Kairi sees it, she’ll be able to make a fulcrum which will help the Gummi ship move. 

Her plan does work in a kinda-sorta way. The Gummi ship moves, but somehow it goes in the opposite direction of the fulcrum deeper into the ground. Kairi fights the urge to bang her head on something likely to give her a concussion. It’s almost as if thanks to being a locus created by the arbitrary whims of children, Neverland also has an arbitrary—if not petty—relationship to physics.

“Ughh, we’re only making it worse!” she groans.

“If only Tink were here—” Peter sighs from right next to her.

“Stop doing that!”

“—she could sprinkle it with pixie dust and your ship could just float away,” Peter continues as if she hadn’t shrieked in his face.

“Mmmkay,” Axel says. “So you’re telling me I’ve been pushing this thing like a sucker when there’s a pixie who could wave a wand and fix this for us?”

“Tink doesn’t have a wand, dummy,” one of the Lost Boys—he seems to be cosplaying as a fox?—says.

“ _Anyways_ , where is she?”

Peter and the lost boys look askance at Axel. Hm. That’s a fun word, askance. Askance. _Askance_. ASKANCE. Kairi only stops thinking about how funny that word— askanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskance[6] —is once she notices the other looking at her with it too because she’s been muttering it to herself.

“She got mad ‘cuz we wouldn’t take a bath,” the other Lost Boy—this one is a bear? Or maybe a wombat?—says.

“Yeah, she said we stink, and she wouldn’t come back until we took a bath,” fox boy sneers.

“And baths are for weenies,” Peter nods.

It’s Kairi’s turn to look askance (askanceaskanceaskanceaskanceaskance). She’s suddenly reminded of being twelve and dealing with that awkward period when Sora, Riku, and Tidus refused to shower. Even after a whole day of sword fighting and mud wrestling and playing in algae. She leans over to Axel.

“If I had a hose, I could fix this like I did for Sora’s mom,” she whispers.

“I can push them in the ocean,” Axel replies, leaning in close.

Kairi smells the hint of Apple Spice & Delight on their clothes and remembers another phase of her friendship with adolescent boys: axe body spray. She always figured it was yet another way for them to avoid showering due to the intense smell, though that was only magnified by how none of her friends—or any boys in school—employed the technique of spray, delay, and walk away. 

“Axel.”

“Lea.”

“Lea, give me the Febreze; I have an idea,” Kairi whispers and once the bottle is in hand turns to the Lost Boys arguing about whether Tink has gotten the mermaids on her side yet. “What if I said you could stop smelling bad without taking a bath?”

Peter raises an eyebrow, “I’d ask you to pinky swear it’s not a trick and that you aren’t a spy sent by Tink.”

Kairi holds up both of her pinkies which Peter eagerly takes with his own. He crosses their arms so that they’re tangled up in one another and stares deeply into Kairi’s eyes. She hopes they aren’t still bloodshot.

“Alright, deal,” he lets go. “Now make us smell nice.”

“Close your eyes and cover your mouths,” Axel says.

Once the three boys have obeyed, Kairi sprays them down with a liberal amount of the Febreeze. An apple-y mist hangs in the air and Kairi nearly gags on it. She hopes with every fiber of her being that it works.

“Tink!” Peter calls after checking himself and the other Lost Boys over. “You can come out now, we took a bath!”

Nothing happens at first. Kairi is certain she’d have a heart attack if it did because wouldn’t that mean Tink had been listening in or watching them the whole time and thus wouldn’t be fooled by their scheme? Instead, a few minutes pass. Then a few more. All the while Peter periodically shouts into the air for Tink to come and see that they’re totally clean now. 

Just when Kairi is about to give up, she hears the sound of bells ringing in the near distance (is that an oxymoron? _Near_ distance. Like on a literal level, what does it even mean? Something far away that isn’t _that_ far away? Shouldn’t something like “over there” suffice in that case?). A tiny, yellow ball of light streaks over the tree line and swirls around Peter and the Lost Boys.

“Y’see, Tink?” the bear Lost Boy says. “We’re not stinky no more.”

The glowing ball lands on top of his head and Kairi can see that there’s a tiny fairy in a green minidress inside it. The fairy tugs at one of the fursuit (COSTUME! IT’S A COSTUME, DON’T THINK OF IT AS A FURSUIT!)’s ears and takes a big whiff. Without missing a beat, the fairy flutters over to the fox Lost Boy and then Peter Pan to do the same. Once she’s gotten her fill of the Apple Spice & Delight, she perches on Peter’s shoulder.

“So… we’re good, Tink?” he asks.

She nods and the sound of tiny jingle bells follows her every movement.

“... okay,” Kairi says slowly. “So, are we” she gestures to herself and Axel, “good?”

“Oh! Right! Tink, can you help these guys with some pixie dust?”

Tink shakes her head.

“They’re the ones who helped us with the whole bath thing.”

Tink gestures to Peter rudely and then spanks herself.

“Hey! I do not just use your pixie dust as a bargaining chip!”

“Ya kinda do, Peter...” the bear Lost Boy whispers.

Tink points at him and nods. 

The argument keeps going back and forth like this for a while. Despite how stupid it is watching three prepubescent boys argue with what amounts to a sentient doorbell, Kairi can’t tear her eyes away. It’s just that interesting somehow. Axel disappears for a moment and returns with a bag of popcorn.

“Oh, cool. Thanks,” she says, taking a handful as Peter explains that making the crocodile fly so it could harass Captain Hook from the skies was important. “But where did you get this from?”

Axel looks at his hands, “Gonna be honest with you, bud. I have no idea.”

Kairi nods, comfortable to let the mystery of the suddenly appearing popcorn be the one thing she doesn’t question on this nonsense journey for pizza. The incomprehensible argument between Peter Pan and Tink only goes on for a couple more minutes before she gestures wildly to a calendar she conjured out of pixie dust and crosses out what amounts to a whole week.

“You drive a hard bargain, Tinkerbell, but we’ll take it,” he says, crossing his heart and presumably hoping to die.

Without another word (ding?) Tink rises into the air and circles the Gummi ship in mist of glowing gold dust. She’s haphazard in her application because some of it ends up landing on Kairi and into Axel’s popcorn. Kairi doesn’t think anything of it though because she, like Axel, is mesmerized by the pretty lights and shiny everything. In fact, she almost misses Peter explaining what to do now that the Gummi ship has been covered in pixie dust.

“Just one happy thought?” she finds herself saying. 

“That’s pretty much it,” Peter replies. He pauses. “Well, we’re gonna go now.”

Kairi keeps eating the popcorn, watching somewhat vaguely as Peter Pan and his Lost Boys unceremoniously leave. She’s pretty sure that this popcorn is extra buttery which normally wouldn’t mean anything, but a combination of the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, is stoned six times over, and the physical texture of the popcorn butter is making it incredibly difficult to focus on the task at hand. 

“This popcorn is _so_ good,” Axel sighs 

* * *

Getting back into the cockpit is easy enough once Kairi and Axel finally finish the popcorn. The rumblies in her tumblies has gotten a bit quieter and Kairi is sure that she probably has enough energy to cast a couple spells again if push comes to shove. The only thing left for them to do is think happy thoughts and get the Gummi ship back into space.

“Way ahead of you, Kairi,” Axel says, rubbing his temples like a TV psychic. 

Slowly but surely, Kairi starts to feel the Gummi ship twitch and shake. It’s as if even though they got the pixie dust, the ship still needs to break free of the hole the crash dug it into. Ever patient, Kairi sits back and watches Axel focusing on his happy thought, content to let him do the heavy lifting this time. There’s a sudden jerk and Kairi can see the ground below slowly getting further away through her window.

“So, what’s your happy thought?” she asks.

“I’m imagining how good it’s gonna be to walk into that pizza place and stuff our faces with enough to explode our stomachs,” Axel says with a wink. “One time me and X—”

The Gummi ship drops. Luckily, it doesn’t drop very far. Maybe a few feet at the most. Kairi grips her seatbelt tight, waiting for any other surprises. Of course, the kid in the green tights tricked them. He was literally arguing with his pixie friend for fifteen minutes about how often they tricked and pranked and misled some other dude on their island named Hook. What would have stopped him from doing the same to them?

Kairi’s about to get out of the ship and attempt at least a small Zero Gravity now that her magic feels mostly back when she notices Axel. He’s gone paler than normal. Eyes wide and searching the ship for something that Kairi can guess by his frantic expression isn’t there. 

“You okay, bud?” she asks.

He takes three quick breaths and exhales four long ones, “Sure. Yeah. I just... I don’t think my happy thought is gonna get us in the air. Can you get this one?”

The way his voice quivers when he says that earns her immediate agreement. 

Kairi sits back down and tries to think of the happiest thing she can. Of course, there’s the time she turned Sora back into a human and the time she remembered Sora’s name after her blank year and the time she reunited with Sora and Riku in The World That Never Was and the sight of Sora’s smile after a long day.

The ship begins to rise again. This time at a much more steady and continuous rate. It isn’t until they’ve successfully risen out of Neverland’s atmosphere and Axel has kicked on the propulsion rockets that Kairi lets her thoughts of her true happiest thing—Sora in all his forms and facets—dissipate for the moment. She has important business to handle.

“So, what was that?” Kairi asks.

“What was what?” Axel replies cool as a cucumber—which in retrospect is an odd figure of speech. When on earth are cucumbers cool? Kairi knows people usually put them in the fridge, but they don’t grow in cold environments, do they? If not, doesn’t that mean that a cucumber’s cool is artificial? If that’s the case, then Axel is exactly cool as a cucumber.

“Stop being a cucumber and tell me why your happy thought stopped being happy.”

“A what?”

“... It made more sense in my head.”

Axel gives her a strange look. It’s like he’s looking at her and through her at the same time but finding someone else’s face in her place. Kairi tries not to feel unsettled by that sensation. She already knows there is someone else out there (or rather inside of her now) with her face, but she’s pretty sure this isn’t a Naminé thing.

“I don’t remember,” Axel says finally.

Or maybe it is a Naminé thing.

“You don’t remember what?”

“I don’t know?” Axel sighs. “A person, maybe? It’s like I get flashes and the name is on the tip of my tongue and then it vanishes again.”

“Your friend that you used to go to this pizza place with,” Kairi says.

He nods. And a silence drops over them like pellets of hail in a summer thunderstorm—pinpricks of pain in the middle of something that should feel cathartic. Kairi sighs. Perhaps, as a friend the best thing she can do right now is be an umbrella.

“You know how everyone forgot Sora for a year?” Kairi says. Axel doesn’t respond, so she keeps going. “Well, that’s the thing: I didn’t. Not completely, at least. One day I knew I was waiting for Sora and Riku and the next they were out of sight and mind. Riku not as much as Sora. He just went blurry, but Sora was gone.”

It’s something that they don’t talk about, but the Sora shaped hole wasn't just in her mind. Kairi spent that year seeing Sora’s mom looking just as lost and confused—having a teenage boy’s bedroom in your house, but no teenage boy would do that to you—but with only the faintest sense of why she felt a degree of kinship to the woman.

“And any time I went back to our island,” she continues. “I’d feel like there was this big something missing. Anytime I mentioned it to Selphie, Tidus, or Wakka they just thought I had gone crazy. But I just knew there was something. And then I found this, uh, cave painting Sora and I had drawn of each other...” 

It was the one with the Paopu fruit. The one she had completed the night Sora first saved the universe. She doesn’t want to explain the whole legend of the Paopu fruit to Axel right now, so she presses on. 

“Seeing it, I thought it’d trigger all these memories. But nope. There was still this stutter-step in my mind anytime I tried to remember him.”

“But then Naminé fixed everything and you could remember,” Axel interjects, chin resting lazily atop the steering wheel.

“Not exactly,” Kairi says. “Actually, Roxas helped me out. One day his heart reached out to mine and then I just knew. What I’m saying is, maybe you need to try reaching out with your heart. Maybe that way you’ll find a clue.” 

She puts her hands in her lap and stares straight ahead. It’s a gesture she’s learned from living with the mayor all these years. Whenever the mayor wants to signal that a point has been made and that his wisdom has been fully imparted, he does this. As conversation enders go, it can be a bit abrupt, but having such a clear line of demarcation had always worked for Kairi.

Axel starts to laugh.

“Wow. Is this the weed talking or have you always been this wise?” he snickers.

She shoves him, “ _Obviously_ , it’s the weed.”

* * *

Kairi has to fight the urge to shout, “Take us to your leader” or something else to that effect when they beam down from the Gummi ship. First of all, doing that would break the world order or whatever. Second of all, pretending to be an alien while looking exactly the same as always would probably make whoever heard her think she was pulling a prank. And, sure, she would be, but even Kairi has her limits when it comes to sophomoric behavior like that.

“Take us to your leaderrrrrr,” Axel howls into the night sky.

“Seriously?”

“Kairi, you were just monologuing about how much you wanted to do it,” he says. “Besides, there’s nobody even around.”

With a wave of his hand, Axel gestures to the completely empty highway all around them. It feels a bit weird. The sky isn’t pitch black yet, so the sun must have only recently set. At best, it should be around the time for rush hour traffic heading home. Kairi may have spent (most of) her life on an island sans highways, but she watches the mainland news every now and then. Cars should be bumper to bumper and—

“Wait, Axel—”

“Lea.”

“Lea, did you beam us down onto a highway instead of to the pizza place?”

Axel raises a finger as if he’s going to explain how this was all part of his genius plan, but then he looks around. After surveying the wide expanse of nothing but road in all directions, he sticks out his thumb.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna hitch us a ride,” he explains. “I saw this in a movie once.”

“Everyone’s seen this in a movie, but there’s no cars around to give us a ride!”

“True,” Axel says, reaching down to the hem of his cloak and slowly pulling it up. “So, I’m just gonna up the ante.”

Kairi rolls her eyes. There is no version of reality whereby sticking out a thumb and showing some leg on an empty road that a person can magically summon a car to give them a ride to some other location. 

The first thing Kairi hears almost thirteen seconds later is loud rock music and screeching tires skidding to a stop. A car appears right in front of Axel who immediately puts his cloak back down and taps on the roof. The car is an old yellow (or is it yellowing???) pickup truck with a red and white rocket that reads—

“You have got to be kidding me,” Axel and Kairi say simultaneously as the driver rolls down his window.

“Hey, you dudes know it isn’t safe to walk in the middle of I-65, right?” the driver, a young man maybe a couple years older than Kairi with stringy blond hair tied back in a ponytail, asks.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Axel says. “Quick question: are you heading to Pizza Planet?”

The driver rolls his eyes, “No duh, dude. You think I’d be driving a junker like this otherwise?”

“Point taken. Anyway, could we hitch a ride with you?”

The driver shakes his head no. He leans out of the window so he can get a better look at them both, as he explains that it’s against regulations or something but the moment he’s downwind of them a small smile crosses his face.

“Wait a second... are you two high?” he asks.

Kairi blanches. Then she tries to discreetly sniff her hoodie. Obviously, she fails at discretion because his grin gets bigger. Axel leans on the truck and reaches into one of his inner pockets to produce the gallon sized Ziplock bag which is still pretty full despite how many times they’ve smoked today.

“Perhaps we can make a trade?” he says. 

And that’s how Axel and Kairi end up smoking in a pizza delivery truck with a guy named Kyle. They pass the bong in an awkward circle going from Kyle to Axel in the passenger seat to Kairi in the back seat with a bunch of pizzas. It’s only on their third or fourth go-round that Kairi finally asks about the pizzas.

“Don’t you have to deliver those?”

Kyle groans, “I was, but I think all these orders were crank calls.”

Kairi counts at least seventeen pizza boxes, “All of them? That can’t be right...”

“I stood there ringing doorbells for, like, ever and no one even answered,” Kyle explains. “Here’s hoping this doesn’t come out of my paycheck or anything.”

Kairi holds up her hand to cross her fingers in the rearview mirror’s line of sight when Axel passes her the bong again. Since Kyle has his eyes on the road, Axel doesn’t hesitate to hold his finger to the bowl and ignite it for her in lieu of a lighter. Kairi thanks him with a nod and inhales deeply. 

This is their seventh time smoking today. And that feels like it should feel special. Kind of. Seven is an important number. Both a lucky number and the number of guardians of light. Kairi mulls over the prophecy thingy as she passes the bong back to Kyle. Thirteen darknesses and seven lights clashing at the keyblade graveyard. 

“Why do we have to play fair with the whole lights vs. darknesses thing?” she murmurs.

“Huh?”

“Like, the Organization has thirteen people, but there’s only seven of us? Not fair.” Kairi stares at her hands, finally finding them interesting. She flexes them twice and watches her fingers fing, “Y’know, I’d bet if we trained the other princesses of heart, we could have _thirteen_ lights.”

“Pfft, why stop there?” Axel asks. “We could just summon everyone Sora’s met on his adventures for one last epic crossover battle royale.”

“ _Huh_?”

“Yeah, and that way Xehanort wouldn't know what to do with himself. Besides, thirteen darknesses versus fifty-something lights can’t make the χ-blade.”

“Once more I say, _huh_?” Kyle says a bit louder this time.

Kairi blanches again. She can’t be so stoned that she forgot Kyle the pizza delivery guy was here while she sits in the backseat of his truck. But then again, she has smoked seven times within the past four hours. If being stoned is like a status condition, it probably stacks. 

Axel swoops in to misdirect, “It’s... part of this role-playing thing we’ve got going.” 

“Cool beans,” Kyle says. “So. Does that mean you dudes _Verum Rex_ cosplayers or something?”

“What’s cosplay?” Axel asks at the same time Kairi asks, “What’s _Verum Rex_?

Kyle passes the bong to Axel and starts digging in one of his pockets. Were there any other cars on the highway, Kairi would be afraid because of how the car begins to drift and list with Kyle driving one-handed and paying no attention to the road. A couple seconds later he produces a phone—smaller than theirs but using the same general design aesthetic—and gives holds it over the armrest for Kairi to see.

“The code’s 6969—

“Nice,” Axel murmurs.

“—and you can just Google Verum Rex or whatever,” Kyle continues.

With nothing to do with her endlessly fing-ing fingers, Kairi types in the code and gets to searching. Apparently, Verum Rex is a video game. A JRPG or whatever. It’s about some dude named Yozora who’s trying to—

The words start to blur a bit on the screen. It’s simultaneously like her mind is too hazy to interpret the letters and like some force is preventing her from gathering any other information about this Yozora guy and his wacky video game adventures doing something-or-other. She is able, however, to looks at some of the images posted on the Verum Rex wiki. The general fashion aesthetic _does_ jive with what she and Axel are wearing.

“You see the resemblance, right?” Kyle asks when she hands him the phone back.

“Yeah,” Kairi replies. “Uh... I guess our Ma—er—Boss is a fan of the game?”

The trip down the highway continues like that for a while with Kyle asking them questions about things Kairi and Axel have to cleverly dodge answering until he takes an exit. In the near distance (seriously, that feels so oxymoronic of a concept) Kairi sees another red and white rocket. It’s standing next to a building shaped a bit like the planet Saturn with the words PIZZA PLANET atop the rings in bright green letters.

“Holy crap we’re here,” Kairi squeals at the same time her stomach growls.

“Language young lady,” Axel says, pointing at her growling stomach.

Kyle lets them out at the edge of the parking lot just in case any of his bosses might be watching. He thanks them for the weed and Axel passes him eight hundred munny which must be a lot of money on this world because  Kyle’s eyes light up like he just got paid four times his actual hourly wage in a month[7]. Once Kyle pulls away, Axel squares his shoulders.

“You ready for this, Kairi?” he asks.

Her stomach growls in response.

“Noted. Then _vamanos_ , girl. We got pizza to gorge ourselves on.”

* * *

There are several times while Axel talks to the hostess to get them a table that Kairi thinks the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling are real. It’s probably a mixture of being high and the unexpectedly good galaxy themed paint job on the ceiling. And the otherwise low lighting in the place. But, yeah, it reminds Kairi a bit of being on the island watching for shooting stars with Riku and Sora.

Back in reality the hostess is giving them the side-eye. Kairi knows this time not to check and smell her clothes again, but the hostess doesn’t seem to be looking at them like she’s suspicious of drug related activity. Looking out onto the main floor of the Pizza Planet, it’s clear that this is more of a “family establishment” aimed at little kids what with all the arcade games and prize corner and everything being scaled for people shorter than five feet tall. 

The two of them are definitely not kids. 

“Alright, party of two,” the hostess says, a smile replacing the suspicious look. She wraps a plastic band around Kairi’s wrist and stamps something on the back of her hand. “Follow me.”

Kairi is practically bouncing on her toes as the hostess leads them past the drink station (stylized as alien sludge), through racing arcade games (mission control) and down a flight of stairs (the teleporter) to a table in a section right in front of a stage.

“So, your pizza and breadsticks should be out in a few,” the hostess says, setting down a Big Gulp sized cup full of strange coins and a tiny buzzer on the table. “But feel free to play some games or explore the station.”

“Will do,” Axel says with a wink as the hostess flees. “So… what should we do first?”

Part of Kairi wants to just sit and wait patiently. They’ve done nothing but do stuff all day. This portion of everything could be chill and relaxing as a good contrast, after all. But there’s another part—a twitchy part—that doesn’t want to sit still. Not yet at least. She glances at the big gulp cup full of coins.

“Maybe if we win enough tickets at skee ball I can probably get a spider ring or something from the prize wall...” she says slowly. 

Axel leads the way back upstairs to the game floor where there is, oddly enough, no skee ball. Instead, they end up at the closest equivalent: a basketball shooting game stylized as tossing asteroids into an evil alien space station. It’s no blitzball, but Kairi’s pretty good at the game, landing twelve shots in a row in the time that it takes Axel to make three. 

After that they head to whac-a-mole (Axel wins that one easily) and then a racing game (they tie if only because Kairi accidentally crashes her car into Axel’s) and then dance dance revolution (they both end up tripping and falling off the dance pad several times) and then pinball (Axel nearly sets a middle age mom on fire because she tilts the machine when she squeezes past) and then the ball pit (it’s weirdly Zen in there despite all the screaming children) and then a crane game (Kairi wins a little green alien) and then laser tag. 

While in laser tag Axel and Kairi get paired up with a ten-year-old wearing a set of plastic wings and a cowboy hat. Not wanting to cheat the kid out of a fun experience, they do their best to play laser tag like sane, normal people. Obviously, they fail due to being stoned seven times over, but it’s the thought that counts. Or at least, that’s what Kairi thinks when the kid’s thanking them afterwards for doing a fastball special with him so he could shoot as many of their competitors as possible from the air only for them to get kicked out before a single shot could be fired. 

“Uh... sure kid.” Axel says, just as confused as Kairi.

“It was just like flying like Buzz Lightyear!” the kid exclaims as he zooms off presumably to find his mom or group or whoever he came to this place with.

“Hey, so did the buzzer thing go off yet?” Kairi asks after a beat.

Axel reaches into his sleeve and pulls out the little thing which isn’t buzzing at all. Considering that they’ve been playing games since a quarter till skin and it’s now half past skin, Kairi figures that something might be up. She suggests as much to Axel and they head back to their table, prize tickets and all.

When they get there, the only addition is two pitchers: one with ice water and one with coke. Kairi pours herself a cup. Axel drinks straight from the water pitcher. There aren’t many other people in the area around their table, but Kairi can tell that she and Axel aren’t the only ones still waiting for pizza. 

There’s a table that was clearly set up for a birthday party where a middle-aged man periodically checks his watch. There’s another table where a couple of kids keep leaving and coming back and looking more and more disappointed each time. The table right next to theirs is probably the most sanguine, but that’s only because the grandma waiting there (presumably while her grandkids are playing) is clearly napping.

But then something catches her eyes over on the stage. An astronaut emcee with a pair of comically large sunglasses over the helmet visor and a Hawaiian shirt taps on a pair of mics dead center of the stage. An ethereal blue-green spotlight shines down from above.

“Just letting everyone know that karaoke is a go,” he says. “Don’t be afraid to step up and show your stuff.”

“That,” Kairi says, pointing at the stage. “I wanna do that now.”

Kairi has only tried karaoke once. It was during her blank year without Riku and Sora. Selphie and the others had declared that Kairi was being too mope-y lately and dragged her out for a night on the town. Considering how small the island is, there weren’t many options for where to go. In the end, however, they landed in an arcade with a karaoke lounge. 

Selphie and Rinoa had flourished doing karaoke, but Kairi couldn’t bring herself to get up and sing. It was nerves, mostly. That night the arcade was packed and there were so many people—all of them she knew personally since the Mayor was on a re-election bid again and that meant going out as a family to shake hands with his constituents—staring that Kairi couldn’t bring herself to even look at the mic without wanting to throw up.

But now? Now, there’s barely anyone around. Most of the people in the Pizza Planet seem to be mulling about in the arcades on the upper floor to distract themselves from all the pizza they’re not eating. She doesn’t know any of these people. There are no stakes. So Kairi marches up to the stage with Axel trailing behind her.

“So, what’ll you be singing?” the astronaut asks, handing her a catalog.

“Uh...” Kairi murmurs. None of the song titles sound familiar. It’s almost as if she were looking at a list of songs from another world or something. “Actually, I have no idea what to pick...”

The astronaut looks her up and down, “Hmm... I think you might like d-016.” He finally notices Axel. “And is this gonna be a duet or are we doing a mash-up?”

“Oh, I’m jus—”

“Yes!” Kairi says, not knowing what a mash-up is.

“But, Kairi, I can’t sing!”

“Too bad, follow my lead,” Kairi says, dashing up to the stage. 

From here Kairi can see several small TV screens around the room. She figures those are for the lyrics because “d016 and d997 MASH-UP” appears on all of them. Axel takes his place right next to her, looming over his microphone. Kairi nudges him gently and gives him her best “this is gonna be soooo fun” smile before holding the microphone to her mouth. The music begins to play for a song she doesn’t know. 

“ _I’ve been standing at the edge of the water, longer than i can remember never really knowing why..._ ” Kairi begins, following the lyrics on the screens.

The song is a gentle ballad, and it seems to be about wanting to explore. Kairi relates to the feeling. When she first appeared on the islands, she had inspired that feeling in her friends. After all this is over, she still wants to travel the worlds and see all the new places Sora had told her about. The lyrics feel like they’re building up to the first chorus when the music slightly shifts and the screens direct Axel to follow along

“ _I have often dreamed of a far-off place where a great warm welcome will be waiting for me_ ,” Axel chimes in, quiet and unsure. Weirdly enough that feels right. This song is also a ballad about wanderlust but also about tying that desire to be somewhere else to the feeling of maybe someday belonging. Axel gets through the chorus and starts the second verse when the screens prompt Kairi to join back in.

The song continues like that, the two of them going back and forth and even joining in together at parts. There would be greater description of what _exactly_ they sing, but that would probably break the  Terms of Service[8], and thus all that can be said is in the moment they feel amazing. Kairi belts. Axel croons. As the song goes on, a small crowd begins to form around the stage, cheering them on. At one point Kairi finds herself dancing on the empty tables while the astronaut emcee begs her to get down. Just as she gets herself back onstage, the music cuts out and is replaced by the sound of one ( _Only_ one _?_ Kairi thinks imperiously) person clapping.

“Well, well, well I never thought I’d find you here of all places,” the not-Sora says 

“You again!” Kairi shouts.

“Me again,” the not-Sora agrees. “We didn’t get to finish our chat back in Deep Jungle, Kairi.”

“Funny,” Axel interjects. “I thought we kicked your as—

“Language! There’s kids in the audience!”

“I thought we kicked your _butt_ halfway across that world,” Axel finishes.

The not-Sora shakes his head, “A fluke, really. I mean, why would hitting me with your ship actually _do_ anything?”

The astronaut emcee stands between the not-Sora and stage, “Look, buddy. I don’t care what your deal with these two is, but you can take your posturing nonsense elsewhere.”

The not-Sora cocks his head in confusion. It’s like he hadn’t really noticed the other people in the room. Or perhaps like he hadn’t expected someone to speak to him like that. The confusion on his face fades quickly though and a dark aura begins to well up around him.

“Oh, I _can_ ,” the not-Sora says, summoning his keyblade and shooting a giant fireball at one of the tv screens. “But I think I’m gonna do it here. That okay with you, chief?”

The astronaut emcee doesn’t answer. The civilians have already started running and screaming, and he joins them clambering up the stairs and out of the karaoke area. Kairi hears someone chanting the words “active shooter” as they flee. Not-Sora turns his attention back to Kairi.

“Now, where were we?”

Axel waves his hand. The little embers and sparks surrounding the destroyed tv screen gather at his hands and explode once more but this time in a bright light that transforms into his keyblade. 

“We were gonna kick your ass,” Axel says.

“Show off,” Kairi snickers, summoning her keyblade in a less flashy manner. “But, yeah, if a fight’s what’s gotta happen to get this through your thick skull not-Sora—”

“Vanitas.”

“Gesundheit.”

“My name is Vanitas, you dolt,” Vanitas shouts.

He does a little stutter step and Kairi knows he’s about to teleport and attack from above or below. Before he vanishes, she casts zero gravity on his boots—the Chanel boots—and throws herself at him. The collision must be unexpected, because Vanitas goes down easily, and it takes no effort at all to pin him to the ground and hold her keyblade to his throat.

“Oh no, whatever will I do?” Vanitas drawls.

“Leave us alone, obviously.”

“Honestly, I’m just wondering how he even found us.”

“I dunno _Axel_ , how did I find you?”

Axel gets a confused look on his face. Kairi is confused too since that’s not really an answer of any kind. Vanitas just looks smug and mouths Axel’s name a couple more times. Surprisingly, Axel doesn’t bother correcting Vanitas. Kairi knows that she has trouble remembering to call him Lea—and the narrator doesn’t even bother—so this feels particularly odd. It’s almost as if—

“Axel!” Kairi shouts. “It’s your name!”

“But my name is Lea.” 

“I mean the X in Axel!”

Sora had said something about how Organization XIII had tracked him in the sleeping worlds through an X they placed on his shirt. Master Yen Sid had theorized that was the same reason all of the Organization XIII members had Xs in their names—so Xemnas could always keep tabs on them.

“Bingo bongo, princess,” Vanitas says. “And who says you’re not actually smart?”

“So... wait,” Axel groans, kneading his fingers into his temples. “You found us in Twilight Town and followed us here because of the rescue... uh rex, er, recess?”

“Sound it out.”

“Yeah, take your time.”

“The X in my other name is called the... the....”

“The recessive sigil,” Kairi says. 

“How on earth can neither of you say _recusant’s sigil_?”

“Ohhhh _recusant’s_ sigil,” Axel and Kairi say together

It is at that moment that a trio of heartless about as big as horses come barrelling down the stairs. They’re trailing a yellow, viscous _something_ behind them which is leaking and dripping from all over their bodies which are vaguely triangle shaped. Kairi can see that the heartless have these strange red spots that look kinda burnt at the edges and she really, really doesn’t want to fight pizza heartless today but goddammit if the universe hasn’t sent three of them hurtling towards her.

She leaps off of Vanitas and rolls out of the way, hoping that her would-be attackers run into the wall a la a herd of charging bulls that a matador successfully dodges. Instead, they make a hairpin turn, knocking over several tables along the way, and crash right into her. Kairi’s able to fend them off somewhat with her keyblade, but they still knock her flat on her back with only Destiny’s Embrace between Kairi and getting vored by pizza heartless.

As she tries and tries to push three heartless away, the room goes swelteringly hot. They yip and screech and in their chaos, Kairi is able to hit them with a Zero Gravity and roll away again. She gets to her feet to see Axel hurling fireball after fireball at Vanitas who just bats them away with fireballs of his own.

“Seriously?” she shouts. “Pizza heartless?”

Vanitas catches one of Axel’s fireballs in his hand, “Kids today just don’t appreciate the hard work that goes into villainy.”

“How much do you wanna bet that they’re why we’ve been here so long without any pizza?” Axel asks.

There’s another crash from upstairs. Axel and Kairi look at each other and then back to Vanitas.

“You didn’t think I just made _three_ , did you?” he snickers. “Way I see it, you can either surrender or my army of pizza heartless will take out all the people still trying to evacuate this place.”

Neither Axel nor Kairi miss a beat and immediately head for the stairs. Stoned or not, they’re perfectly in sync thanks to how much they’ve trained together. When Kairi leaps into the air, Axel’s keyblade is there to give her a second boost so she can rocket into the air. When Axel makes it to the top of the stairs with his keyblade raised overhead, Kairi casts Collision Magnet so they can more easily draw the Heartless to them.

Both Axel’s propulsion and Kairi’s spell work a bit too well, however. The other pizza heartless come rushing for the magnet, struggling through the air where Kairi is, putting her in their line of sight. She and Axel make brief eye contact and their bodies know exactly what to do. Kairi flings her keyblade down and Axel tosses his up. Possibly because she’s stoned seven times over, Kairi is able to see the full trail that their dual Strike Raid traces across the pizza heartless. Normally, a Strike Raid feels like throwing one’s keyblade and simultaneously catching it on the other side of its arc. Right now, Kairi feels her body following Destiny’s Embrace’s trail as it cleaves through the pizza heartless and streaks past Axel and Bond of the Blaze do the same. Their keyblades easily slice through the pizza heartless, exploding them into a rain of mozzarella and tomato sauce. 

Briefly, as the released hearts float into the air, Kairi wonders about the ethics of tasting any of the pizza remains since she’s about 82% sure that it used to be a person. Or were Pureblood Heartless originally people and Emblem Heartless the ones that were just created from artificial darkness and tended to hoard people’s hearts?

“No, you’re right,” Axel says, wiping some of the cheese from his cloak. “Emblem heartless used to be people more often than not, Purebloods just come from darkness naturally.”

“And the darkness in these hearts was pizza based?” Kairi asks with a shudder.

“Minimum wage work will do that to you,” Axel replies as the three pizza heartless from downstairs bound towards them.

Kairi slams her keyblade into the floor and casts Blizzara which turns the stairs to ice and impales the three from below their gooey, gooey cheese feet. Like the others, they explode, however no hearts fly away as their forms disintegrate. Instead, Vanitas—who’s practically skipping his way up the frozen stairs—snaps his fingers and three more pizza heartless appear in their place. Kairi hears a crash from behind.

“You have got to be kidding me...” Axel groans. 

Just past the drink station Kairi can see another heartless through her peripheral vision. It does not look like it is made of pizza, however. It looks kinda-sorta like an oven with a puppet chef dangling over the stovetop.

“I can do this all day, Kairi,” Vanitas says. “Can you?”

Axel waves, “You know I’m here too, right?”

“Only because the cosmic joke that is your existence decided to inflict its punchline through your presence, yeah,” Vanitas shoots back.

“Oh, I’ll show you a punchline...”

Before Axel can do that or the heartless closing in on them from all sides can attack, Kairi hears another voice inside the pizza planet. It sounds like a little kid. It sounds like a little kid _crying_. From the look on Vanitas’ face and the way all the heartless perk up, Kairi’s pretty sure they hear it too. The heartless bound away. 

“Orrrr you could see if you can get to the kid before my heartless do,” Vanitas says with a singsong lilt to his voice. “Here’s hoping they’re not _feeling hungry_.”

Kairi doesn’t get to say anything snappy because Axel is immediately dragging her away in the direction of the heartless and crying kid. They’re guardians of light. Saving the innocent from the forces of darkness is more important. In the back of her mind, Kairi feels something familiar about the idea of a hero with a keyblade rushing in to save a little girl from monsters made of darkness. That sensation fills her with determination.

The crying leads them back to the laser tag area and they beat the heartless there only by virtue of Kairi throwing strike raids and Axel flash-stepping, but there’s still crashing and rumbling from the horde coming in hot behind them. Wordlessly, Kairi and Axel decide to split up to search the area. 

Fog and strobe lights occupy the area. Only now does Kairi notice how cave-like the laser tag arena is. These elements and the remnant of vertigo from all the jumping around she’s done, make navigating the foggy depths a bit more difficult than it was before. She feels shaky on her feet and a bit off balance. 

“Hey!” she calls. “I’m here to help. Where are you?”

“O-over here,” a familiar voice says from her left. 

Or maybe it’s coming from the right? Or possibly from below? Kairi’s disorientation only grows as she tries to locate the source of the voice until he feels her feet catch on something small. She trips, her keyblade clattering to the ground in as just an undignified manner as she did. Unlike the voice she doesn’t have to worry about looking for the keyblade, she can just call it back, but when she reaches out with her heart nothing happens. It’s like something else is tugging on the keyblade itself and Kairi feels her hand reach forward. Fingers brush against fingers when she feels the hilt. She and the other person both flinch backwards. Both because of the surprise and a strange jolt of electricity that passes between those fingers when they touch. Kairi’s heart flutters and it’s like she can see the contours of another memory. 

A strong warrior protecting a little girl from monsters (someone else is there, but their form isn’t as defined). The little girl’s hand clinging to the warrior’s leg. Her hand brushes against the warrior’s sword. A flutter of a tiny heart. A connection. The memory cuts out and Kairi is grabbing her keyblade—this time without someone else reaching for it too.

“Are you... are you okay?” she asks the person she can’t see.

“I want my mom,” the voice—it’s gotta be a little boy—sobs.

“It’s okay. I can take you to her.”

Kairi reaches out her hand and a smaller one takes it. Another flutter. Her keyblade feels warm. But there’s no time to think about that now. 

“Axel!” 

“Lea!”

“Lea! I found the kid” 

Kairi grips his hand to make sure that she isn’t imagining him. She hasn’t hallucinated at all today despite smoking weed seven times over the course of the day but considering how being in artificial fog without the adrenaline of shooting other laughing people with a toy gun got her off balance, Kairi doesn’t want to take any chances. As she slowly makes her way back to the entrance—keyblade positioned defensively in front of her—she starts to make out more and more of the kid. It’s the little boy they had played laser tag with earlier. Oh dear. 

Axel is already at the laser tag entrance. He’s crouched almost ridiculously low on the ground, sneaking furtive looks from the edge. Kairi and the kid join him on the opposite side. It’s all Kairi can do to keep herself from gasping when she sees what awaits them back on the main floor. The pizza heartless—which are pacing as if patrolling—have multiplied. Just over by the drink station Kairi can see the oven heartless rumbling and shaking. After a couple seconds it buzzes and its “mouth” opens, shooting out a pizza. The little chef on the stovetop comes to life then and slices the pizza into eight pieces which then come to life as heartless themselves. 

“Oh crap,” Kairi whispers.

“That’s a bad word,” the kid whispers back. And, shit. The kid. Kairi sends Axel a panicked glance. Getting out with just two of them fighting their way out would have been difficult enough, so doing that while also keeping a defenseless kid close feels impossible. She doesn’t think she can even try to strike raid teleport with him to the door. Taking passengers along for that isn’t a skill Kairi’s completely mastered. Last time she tried with while training with Master Yen Sid, he ended up losing eight inches from his beard somehow. Beardless or not, Kairi doesn’t want something like that happening to the kid. She tries to convey all this with her eyes. Axel nods in a way that lets her know she was actually saying all of that out loud again. Dangit.

“Hey, so what’s your name?” Kairi asks the kid.

“A-andy Davis,” he replies. “I remember you from before.”

“Nice to meet you, Andy,” Axel says, joining in. “I’m Lea and that’s Kairi.”

“Are you gonna help me find my mom?”

“Definitely!” Kairi says. “But first we’ve gotta get past all those heartless outside.”

Andy turns pale, “Y-you mean the monsters?”

Kairi gulps, “Yeah... We can fight them off with these,” she and Axel hold up their keyblades. “But we’re gonna need you to stick cl—”

“I can help.”

Andy lets go of her hand and he pulls out a little toy popgun from his pocket. It looks like something that a cowboy in a cartoon would have. All of her yikes senses go off then and it takes everything within her not to wheeze. What could a toy gun even do against the heartless.

“Uh... sure?” she says instead. “Just stick close to us.”

“And if things get too hairy you can climb on my back!” Axel adds.

“The monsters have hair now?” Andy shrieks.

Kairi covers his mouth, but it’s too late. The squishy pounding of feet on the linoleum (it’s gotta be linoleum, right? What else would a place like this use? It could be sheet vinyl or something, but that doesn’t really have the same bouncy-give that this does and—) floor begins to rapidly approach. There’s no time like the present, so Kairi gives a signal and Axel leans out to shoot a Firaga at the encroaching horde. The flames explode upward, creating a wall between them and the heartless. 

“Here’s our chance!” she shouts, taking Andy and running.

The Firaga wall lasts only a few seconds, but it’s necessary a few seconds worth of a head start. It gives Kairi the time to set up a couple mine squares behind them. Axel doesn’t wait for the pizza heartless to run over the mines and detonates them himself with a few tiny fireballs. 

Of course, this is when they run into the oven heartless. Kairi briefly lets got of Andy’s hand. She readies her keyblade. Lunges. Strikes. Slashes. Her attacks are a flurry, but they don’t do much damage. Her opponent—the puppet chef—flails about with its arms which sends Kairi careening backwards. Axel is there immediately to catch her before she can run into the pizza heartless at their back, but Andy is still there on the ground in front of the oven heartless.

Everything slows down. The oven opens, flames spilling out like saliva. Andy screams. He points the toy gun right into the oven. Kairi tries to recover and propel herself back. Axel is ahead of her, but a tendril made of cheese wraps itself around his waist and yanks him backwards. Another comes for her. She strikes at the cheese, but it isn’t freeing her fast enough as the little boy in their charge faces down a giant heartless monster. Andy pulls the trigger.

A sound like a pop and an explosion rings out. The oven heartless flies backwards as if it had been struck. Andy holds up his pop gun which has a stream of smoke fizzing out of the barrel. Kairi gets herself free then and sprints for Andy. 

“Kairi over here!” Axel shouts. 

She picks Andy up like a teddy bear and she finds herself ducking behind a couple flipped tables with Axel. 

“What just happened?” she exhales.

“My gun is real!” Andy shrieks.

“After we get outta this I’m never touching mozzarella again,” Axel pouts.

“My gun is real!” Andy repeats. 

He points off in the distance where Kairi figures the oven heartless would have landed. The only thing there is a decaying heartless carcass. But that doesn’t make sense. How would a toy gun defeat a heartless?

“We probably shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Kairi,” Axel says.

“A gift horse?” Kairi and Andy say at the same time.

“Andy can defend himself now.” Axel explains. Kairi’s shock must show on her face because he continues. “On the one hand I know that it’s irresponsible to add a literal child to our party—

“ _I’m_ a literal child.”

“But you’re in that weird age bracket where it’s concerning but not, like, unethical for you to fight monsters trying to kill you,” he continues. “That kid—”

Axel looks over to Andy, ready to use him as an exemplar, but stops short once he notices that the kid is still firing away at the pizza heartless with his toy gun that isn’t really a toy anymore. His shots are eerily accurate, and the kid is whooping with excitement. 

“On the other hand... that.”

“I learned it from watching Woody’s Roundup!” the kid shouts.

Perhaps there’s a lesson here about inimitable violence in children’s media?

Kairi sighs. She comes up with a simple plan. Axel carries Andy who could shoot the heartless coming at the from the back while she keep an eye out for Vanitas to suddenly reappear. They make a break for the door and Axel can signal the gummi ship so they can lead Vanitas away from this world.

“Easy enough, right?” she asks.

Axel nods, picking Andy up, “Everyone ready? On three... 1, 2... 3!”

Kairi vaults over the tables. Despite the fact that he’s carrying a kid, Axel is faster and quickly gets a lead on her as they run down the long floor for the door. Ha. Floor and Door rhyme. Kairi snickers, but then she remembers that she needs to focus. Vanitas could be anywhere. She scans her surroundings as they pass her by. She only sees rubble and general disarray created by the heartless. 

Other than the Hollow Bastion—er, Radiant Garden—Restoration Committee, Kairi wonders who bothers to clean up after heartless attacks. On other worlds, at least. The heartless don’t stop being a thing on a world just because there aren’t keyblade users around except in the cases where they’re only there because someone set them loose. 

“Holy shit!” Axel shouts.

Kairi comes back to reality. In front of her she sees another oven shaped monster swallow Axel and Andy whole. This one is not a heartless. It still has a dark aura about it, but the emblem on its body is completely different. Like two thorny, black hooks linked together to make a heart in the white-space between. 

“It’s called an _Unversed_ ,” whispers Vanitas from her left.

Kairi swings her keyblade and only catches air.

“Oh, you’re gonna hafta do better than that,” Vanitas whispers at her right.

She strikes again and gets nothing again.

“Stay still so I can hit you,” she snaps.

“No why on earth would I do that?” Vanitas asks, perching himself atop his Unversed. He raps his knuckles a couple times on its stovetop and the inside of the over lights up. Kairi can see Axel and Andy banging on the door trying to get free.

“Let them go, Vanitas,” she demands.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll let them go...” he says. “In exchange for you, of course. And you really should make a decision quickly. Who knows when my buddy here is gonna start preheating himself?”

As if acting to punctuate the threat the lights flicker off within the oven and a single flame appears deep within. Kairi knows Axel is probably fireproof, but the same can’t be said for Andy. 

“What do you even want, Vanitas?” Kairi asks. “I thought the whole prophecy needed thirteen versus seven.”

Vanitas laughs. It is a hollow yet somehow hateful sound. Kairi feels as if she’s the butt of some kind of joke right now. That feeling doesn’t subside once he stops laughing. Vanitas daintily leaps from his oven Unversed and takes a couple steps towards Kairi. The look in his eyes is familiar and alien all at once. _Uncanny_. 

There’s something appraising in his gaze and stance as he circles her. He reaches out and his fingers find their way through her hair. Kairi tries her best not to flinch. She’s not some weak damsel in distress on the sidelines in danger because she’s important to the Big Bad’s plans anymore. The keyblade in her hands is proof enough of that. 

As if he can hear her thoughts—or that her inner monologue has become outer again—Vanitas knocks Destiny’s Embrace from her hands. He shakes a finger in her face as if he were scolding a child as he kicks it far away. She can always re-summon it, but at this distance with these stakes Kairi also knows she can’t risk it. Instead, she clenches her fists tight at her sides, doing her best to meet Vanitas’ eyes

“Kairi, I hate to say this,” he says finally. “but the only reason you’re important is because of what can be done _with_ you rather than what _you_ do,” Vanitas pauses. Laughs, “Actually, no. What am I saying? I don’t hate to say that at all.”

He leans in close. Three inches into the bubble of Kairi’s personal space. Close enough that she can smell the scent of decay on his breath. Can practically see it and the spittle in the air between them. 

“You’re a _bargaining chip_ ,” he declares. “An object that gets passed around from power player to power player trying to make themselves king of the mountain. A _girl_ given a seat at the grown-ups table to serve as yet another pretty little ornament. My master knows if we take you, we can get Sora to do pretty much anything and so here I am to make that a reality”

“And what’s your point?” she asks because it’s taking everything in her not to admit that, deep down, everything he’s saying is exactly how she feels.

“I told you already. My point is that you should just give up,” Vanitas explains. He pinches her cheek. “It’s inevitable y—”

And something clicks in her head. The conversation with Merlin and the follow-up with Aerith afterwards. Merlin had said the inevitable trajectory of his life was only predetermined by his choices and nothing else. Aerith had said how people treat her and what she does with her life were two separate things, no matter how much some people tried to marry the two concepts.

In that same regard, a bargaining chip is only so because the people using it that way have declared it to be such. But that’s the thing. A bargaining chip—an _object_ —is not a _person_. It _cannot_ choose the way Kairi is having a choice dangled in her face right now. 

“No.”

“— and then we’ll... excuse me? No, what?” Vanitas asks

“No,” Kairi says again, her keyblade appearing back in her hands. “I’m not going to give up.”

Earlier today, when she was being attacked by that Neoshadow there was this split-second where her rage was transmuted into this bubbling feeling of light exploding like bombs from within. As her thoughts crystalize and her mind focuses on the target standing in front of her wearing Sora’s face, that feeling comes back. Like a reflex she didn’t know she even had, Kairi drops into a fighting stance that she’s never used before. Low to the ground like always but holding Destiny’s Embrace in a reverse grip in her other hand. The moment her keyblade makes contact with her opposite hand that feeling of exploding light overflows, engulfing her and apparently everything in the Pizza Planet lobby. 

The force from what was within suddenly becoming without drives Vanitas and the oven Unversed backwards. Kairi is knocked back a bit too, but it—the power surging from within—catches her and drops her back on her feet in a perfect superhero three-point-landing. 

“Holy shit!” Axel exclaims.

“That’s a _bad_ word,” Andy murmurs.

“Not in this context, kid.”

“What did you just do?” Vanitas sputters, looking at her as if she had grown another head. 

Kairi catches sight of herself in the reflective surface of a busted steel table. Her clothes have changed. Gone from the pale pink she had taken to wearing years ago to a shimmering white on black. Destiny’s Embrace is different too. Not white, exactly but silver. The flowers and vines making up the blade pulsing with a golden light beneath. The hilt no longer heart-shaped, but instead evocative of a rapier’s. She tests the weight in her hand. Grins. 

“Why don’t you come find out?” she asks. 

Vanitas snarls. He does the one-two stutter step that signals he’s going to teleport, but Kairi’s on him before he can slip away. Destiny’s Embrace 2.0 catches his keyblade and she uses the full weight of her reverse grip stance to push Vanitas back towards a wall. He figures out what she’s going for and jabs his knee into her stomach and extends his foot to kick her backwards. And the thing is, Kairi feels the blows, but she doesn’t feel them. The pain that she knows should come from hits like that. Instead, she tosses Destiny’s Embrace in the air and catches it with her dominant hand, switching her grip back to normal. She lunges. Vanitas shoots a barrage of fireballs—erupting as if from a fountain—at her. Kairi barely has to think about it. She slashes through each one effortlessly, her blade practically phasing through them like a ghost. 

“Gotcha!” declares a voice from above. 

Kairi can feel Vanitas’ presence from above and jabs her keyblade into the air. He grunts, surprised to have been caught despite having telegraphed his position. Here, Kairi takes her chance. She unleashes a flurry of blows and slashes upon Vanitas. It is as if her strikes are powered by the speed of light itself. It’s all Vanitas can do to keep up, and even then, she knows he isn’t. Not really. At this close of a distance, he can’t pull any of his tricks and she’s got him overwhelmed. 

Instead, he tries to strike at her left. But Kairi meets him to parry in an instant. He tris to redirect his attack to her legs, but the same happens again. And again. And again. Kairi laughs. It’s like a scene out of a pirate movie with the hero and villain dueling back and forth with their swords clanging against each other in this perfectly choreographed dance of violence and showmanship. 

Kairi reaches out and her free hand finds Vanitas’. With a strength she didn’t know she had, Kairi heaves him into the air, batted even higher with a strike from Destiny’s Embrace. She leaps into the air and it is like she is light and light itself as she throws five somersaulting strikes at Vanitas.

And then another bubbling feeling from within starts to rumble. Kairi lets it take over. The power overflows and it is as if she and it were finally, completely one. She feels the light that she has become call down the stars themselves to strike Vanitas. The crash in through the ceiling and explode all around. The brilliant lights by command of her hands ignite and dance in the Pizza Planet. And it almost feels somewhat tawdry—somewhat unearned—that a place like this would get to experience a grand attack like this. _But_ , Kairi thinks as three pillars of light converge on Vanitas, _If not here, then where? If not now, when?_

The light begins to fade and the sudden shift power with it, but Kairi doesn’t have to worry about Vanitas doing anything. He’s collapsed on the ground under some rubble that must have come from the ceiling when she called down the stars. Not taking any chances, Kairi holds her keyblade to his chin. Weakly, he laughs.

“So, there’s more to you than meets the eye,” he snickers. “Fine. You win. But don’t think my master is done with you yet. Especially after this.”

Vanitas gestures to himself and his obvious battle damage. And then a corridor of darkness appears beneath him on the ground. In less than a moment, he’s gone. The Unversed, too, vanishes, leaving Axel and Andy relatively unharmed. Kairi takes a deep breath. She crouches down low so she’s at eye level with Andy.

“Okay, so Andy can you promise me something?”

“Okay.”

“You can’t tell anybody about what just happened here,” she says. “The heartless, that fight, your toy gun becoming real and magic, none of it.”

“Why not?”

Kairi fumbles her way through an explanation of the world order and how by keeping the secret Andy is actually making him like a secret superhero protecting his world from anyone like Vanitas who might come and attack it. Andy’s eyes light up at the idea of being a secret superhero and Kairi knows that’s got him. Axel finds a crayon and piece of paper to scribble their phone numbers on for Andy to take with him. 

“Just in case some bad guys do come back,” Axel says. 

And with that they send Andy out the door with his toy gun that is probably magic for some reason now. Hopefully, that doesn’t go horribly wrong and lead to a sequel/spin-off or something.[9]

Kairi looks around at all the destruction. On the one hand it definitely is gonna suck for the people who are gonna have to clean this up, but on the other she has literally no intention of sticking around to (maybe) get questioned by the police. She dumps the whole contents of her wallet—about 10,000 munny—into a smoking cash register. Fingers crossed the conversion rate helps a bit with everything.

“Kairi!” Axel calls. He’s over by the back exit holding a pizza box. “We gotta blue skiddo outta here!”

“Coming, Axel,” she says. Pauses. Blanches. “Er, I mean Lea.”

Calling him the wrong name all day is what helped Vanitas track them. Even though this adventure is over and they’ll be safe again soon in Master yen Sid’s Wards, Kairi doesn’t want to take any chances. And, also, it’s kind of a been a long-running dick move. Unintentional on her part, sure, but still not cool.

Kairi vaults over an overturned table and follows _Lea_ out the door. He’s already calling the Gummi ship to beam them back up. Instead of waiting, however, Kairi reaches for the pizza box and takes a single slice—pepperoni and sausage—and takes a tentative bite. And then another. And then a final one for good measure.

“So...” Lea begins. “What do you think? Best pizza ever, right?”

Kairi doesn’t say anything. Instead, she takes another slice. Here’s a secret that, deep down, everyone knows, but many people will deny until after they have taken their final breaths in life: all pizza is good. Sure, there are stand-outs and duds among the wide sample size of all pizza in the known universe, but that spectrum of quality all exists under an umbrella of “good.” This pizza from a chain restaurant aimed at little kids and families? It’s fine. Just fine. But as she scarfs down her second slice, happy that a full mouth prevents her from saying any of this, Kairi just nods.

Lea whoops with joy, leaping into the air like a cartoon prospector that struck gold. They each take four slices and—somehow, despite everything they’ve done today—that hits the spot. A couple seconds after Lea tosses the pizza box into a nearby dumpster the Gummi ship’s tractor beam appears. Kairi lets it pull her up into the cockpit. Shrugs on her seatbelt and settles into her spot while Lea does the same.

Despite everything, today was a good day.

* * *

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> 1Short for "Somebody Else's Problem" field. See: _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ for further explanation[return to text]
> 
> 2It is, actually.[return to text]
> 
> 3On the one hand, go Edgar Rice Burroughs estate for defying The Mouse, but on the other wasn’t the man himself like super Victorian racist? If only there were someone with a PhD in Victorian stuff who could answer that question...[return to text]
> 
> 4In all honesty, the fact that Nobodies can smoke weed and get high really should have clued everyone in that Xemnas was full of shit[return to text]
> 
> 5See the Final Fantasy VII metaseries and then see all pop culture created in response or signifying on it. Poor Aerith is kinda like Gwen Stacey in that regard.[return to text]
> 
> 6According to the Oxford English Dictionary: Askance: **A.** _adv._
> 
>   1. With verbs of seeing, observing, or regarding. Chiefly in **_to look askance_**. 
>   2. From the corner of one's eye (in later use esp. surreptitiously); obliquely; sideways.
>   3. _figurative_. With an expression or attitude of contempt, disapproval, or (now more usually) suspicion 
>     1. It's also incredibly fun to say aloud. [return to text]
> 

> 
> 7When the conversion rate hits, it’s actually about twelve times his actual wages. Sure does suck working minimum wage in the US, don’t it?[return to text]
> 
> 8Let it be known that this _totally_ isn’t a cop out. I _promise_.[return to text]
> 
> 9Coming December 2021 to an ao3 account near you: _Andy Travels the Known Universe_. JK, I gotta work on my dissertation around then.[return to text]


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